Chain of Chance Part 5

"Were you ever on the moon?"

"I'm sorry to say I never was." I was preparing myself for more questions of a cosmological nature when she abruptly changed the subject.

"You speak French so fluently, but with a strange accent and a slightly different vocabulary. You're not from Canada, are you?"

"My family was Canadian; I was born in the States."

"Just as I thought: Then your mother is French?"

"Was French."

I could see that both husband and wife were trying to dampen the old lady's curiosity by means of glances from across the table, but she simply ignored them. "And did your mother speak French with you?"

"Yes, she did."

"Your first name is John. So she must have called you Jean."

"She did."

"Then I shall call you that. Please take away the asparagus, Jean-I'm not supposed to eat it. The secret of growing old, Jean, is having lots of experience you can no longer use. They're right"-she said, indicating the rest of the family-"not to pay me any attention. You're still too young to know, but there's quite a difference between being seventy and being ninety. A fundamental difference," she added for emphasis. She stopped talking and began eating her meal, and came to life again only when the table was being cleared in preparation for the next course.

"How many times did you travel to outer s.p.a.ce?"

"Twice. But I didn't travel very far from earth. If you compare it to an apple, then only as far as the peel is thick."

"Aren't you being modest?"

"Not really."

The conversation had taken a somewhat strange turn, but I can't say I found it awkward, especially since the old lady had a special charm about her. And so I was not the least bit irritated when she went on with her interrogation.

"Are you in favor of letting women travel in outer s.p.a.ce?"

"I really haven't given it much thought," I answered honestly. "If that's their ambition, then why not?"

"You're the ones who started that whole crazy movement, aren't you? That women's liberation business. It's so childish, so tasteless, though it certainly is convenient."

"Do you think so? Why convenient?"

"It's always convenient to know who's to blame for everything. Everything's the fault of men, say the ladies. They're the only ones who can straighten out the world. They want to take your place. As preposterous as it may sound, they do have a definite goal in mind, which is more than can be said of you men."

After a dessert of rhubarb sprinkled with sugar, the kids sneaked out of the dining room and I got ready to leave. But when the doctor heard I was staying at Orly, he insisted I move in with him. I had no desire to take advantage of him, but I was sorely tempted. To put it bluntly, I wanted to pester the h.e.l.l out of him.

Mrs. Barth seconded her husband's invitation and showed me their still-empty guest book, saying it would bring good luck if an astronaut were the first to sign it.

After a round or two of polite exchanges, I finally gave in. It was decided that I would move in with them the following day. Dr. Barth accompanied me to my car and after I was behind the wheel confided that his grandmother had taken a distinct liking to me, adding that this was no small honor. He was still standing in the gateway as I drove off and plunged into a Parisian night.

To avoid the traffic I swung around the center of the city and headed for the boulevards along the Seine, where the midnight traffic was sure to be lighter. I was tired but contented. My conversation with Barth had left me feeling extremely hopeful. I took it easy on the road, not trusting myself after drinking all that white wine. Ahead of me a small 2 CV was nervously hugging the curb. The road was deserted. Warehouses loomed high above the railings that ran along the opposite bank of the Seine, but I hardly noticed them: my mind was wandering. Suddenly a pair of car lights blazed in the rear-view mirror like a couple of suns. I was right in the middle of pa.s.sing the 2 CV and was a little too far over to the left, so I decided to make way for the night racer and drop back into the slow lane, but it was too late. His headlights flooded the inside of my car, and a second later a flattened-out shape came shooting through the gap. By the time I recovered from the air blast, he was gone. Something was missing from the right front fender. All that was left of the mirror was the stem. Cut off. A little farther down the road it occurred to me that if it hadn't been for the wine I would have blocked its path and might now be lying underneath the wreckage of my own car. Now that would have given Randy food for thought. How beautifully my death would have fit the Naples pattern. How sure Randy would have been it was connected with the simulation mission. But it seems I wasn't fated to be the twelfth victim: I made it back to the hotel safely.

On the fourth day of my visit, on a Sunday, in order to put his team's involvement in the case on a more personal basis, and also perhaps to show off his new house, Barth held a little get-together at his place to which more than twenty people were invited. Since I hadn't been prepared for any formal affairs, I decided to drive to Paris on Sat.u.r.day to pick up something more appropriate for the occasion, but Barth talked me out of it. So, dressed as I was in a pair of faded jeans and a scraggly sweater-all my better clothes had been ruined by the Italian police-I stood at the entrance along with the Barths. The walls on the ground floor had been opened up, converting the downstairs area into a s.p.a.cious drawing room. It was a rather strange situation: surrounded by a crowd of bearded neophytes and periwigged bluestockings, I felt a little like a crasher and a little like a host, inasmuch as I was Barth's house-guest .and was even sharing the honors of the house. Being neatly trimmed and shaven, I must have made the impression of an overaged Boy Scout.

Curiously absent from the party was that atmosphere of courtly formality, or even worse that revolutionary clowning so characteristic of intellectuals: ever since the latest events in China, the Maoists had gone into hiding. I made an effort to socialize with all the guests because I knew they had come expressly to meet an allergic astronaut, a roaming detective ad interim. Nonchalantly the conversation turned to the tribulations of the world. Not nonchalantly, really, but in a mood of surrender now that Europe's eternal mission had come to an end, a fact that these graduates of Nanterre and I'Ecole Superieure seemed to grasp better than their compatriots. Europe had survived, but only in an economic sense. Prosperity had been restored, but not the feeling of self-confidence. It was not the cancer patient's fear of malignancy, but the awareness that the spirit of history had moved on, and that if it ever returned it would not be here. France had lost its power and influence, and now that it had been moved from the stage into the audience it was at liberty to show concern for the sufferings of the world. McLuhan's prophecies were coming true, but in an inverse sort of way, as prophecies have a habit of doing. His "global village" was already here, but split into two halves. The poorer half was suffering, while the wealthier half was importing that suffering via television and commiserating from a distance. That it couldn't go on like this was everywhere taken for granted, but it went on just the same. No one asked for my opinion on the State Department's new "wait and see" policy within the economic buffer zone, nor did I venture to offer any. The conversation then switched from the trials of the world to its follies. Among other things, I learned that a famous French film director was planning to make a film about the "ma.s.sacre on the steps." The part of the mysterious hero was to be played by Jean Paul Belmondo; the little girl would be played not by a child actress-since bedding down with a kid would have been considered in bad taste-but by a famous British movie star. Being just recently married, this same actress had invited a number of prominent personalities to her public wedding night-such pastimes were now the vogue-in order to take up a collection around the nuptial bed for the benefit of the airport casualties in Rome. Ever since reading about those Belgian nuns who indulged in charitable prost.i.tution in order to redeem the hypocrisy of the Church, I'm no longer appalled by such things. And of course there was a lot of talk about politics. The latest news item was that members of an Argentine movement of national patriots had been exposed as government stooges. Various people expressed the fear that something like that couldn't be ruled out even in a country like France. Fascism had survived, along with the most ruthless dictators.h.i.+ps-at least in Europe-whereas the only way to deal effectively with extremist terror was to exterminate the activists. Although a democracy refused to condone "preventive murders," it nonetheless looked the other way when it came to progovernment a.s.sa.s.sinations carried out under discreet supervision and with limited liability. This was not to be confused with the old-fas.h.i.+oned type of political execution or repression inst.i.tuted by the State, but was, rather, a form of constructive terror per procurationem. I once heard of a philosophy that advocated the total legalization of violence, which even de Sade regarded as the epitome of true freedom. It would have const.i.tutionally sanctioned every sort of activity -revolutionary as well as reactionary; and since the supporters of the status quo far outnumbered the subversives, the established order was sure to emerge intact in a violent confrontation of both extremes, should it ever come to something like a civil war.

Around eleven Barth began showing the more curious guests around the house, leaving only a handful of people downstairs. I decided to join three of the guests who were sitting around an open patio door. Two were mathematicians belonging to rival camps: Saussure, a relative of Lagrange, was specializing in a.n.a.lysis, that is, in pure mathematics; the other was in applied mathematics, being a programmer and statistician by profession. Even their outward appearance offered an amusing contrast. Saussure looked as if he might have stepped out of a daguerreotype-lean, dark-haired, with chiseled features, bushy sideburns, a gold pince-nez dangling on a ribbon-and wore a j.a.panese transistorized calculator around his neck like a medal, which was obviously meant as a joke. The statistician, a burly, curly-headed blond, was a double for the slouchy Boche featured in French postcards from the time of the First World War, and was in fact of German origin. His name was Mayer, and not Mailleux, as I thought at first after hearing it p.r.o.nounced that way. The mathematicians were in no hurry to make conversation, unlike the third man, a pharmacologist named Dr. Lapidus. Sporting a full-length beard, he looked as if he's just returned from an uninhabited island. He asked me whether the investigation had turned up any abortive cases, that is, cases where the outward signs of insanity had simply come and gone. I answered that all the files were on microfilm, and that unless one wanted to cla.s.sify the Swift case as abortive, there were none falling into that category.

"That's amazing!" he exclaimed.

"Why amazing?"

"The symptoms varied in their intensity, but the moment any of the victims was hospitalized, like that man who jumped out the window, they immediately subsided. If one a.s.sumes the psychosis was chemically induced, that would mean the dose taken had a strange kind of c.u.mulative effect. Didn't anyone notice this?"

"I don't really see your point."

"There's no psychotropic compound known to have such a delayed effect that, say, if it were taken on Monday it could begin producing the first symptoms on Tuesday, cause hallucinations on Wednesday, and reach a maximum intensity on Sat.u.r.day. Of course it might be possible to build up a supply by using a hypodermic injection that it would take several weeks to absorb; but such a procedure would leave traces in the body, and I found nothing in the autopsy reports to indicate this."

"You didn't find anything because nothing like that was ever reported."

"That's what I find amazing!"

"But they might have taken the stuff more than once, which would explain the c.u.mulative effect. . . ."

He shook his head with disapproval.

"How? Between the change in routine and the appearance of the first symptoms there was always a time lapse of six to eight days on the average, nine in one case. And no chemical agent is capable of having such a delayed or c.u.mulative effect. Let's a.s.sume they started taking this chemical substance the first or second day after their arrival; then the initial symptoms would have had to occur within the next forty-eight hours. In the case of patients with kidney or liver diseases that's debatable, but then there weren't any such patients."

"So what's your opinion?"

"The case histories would indicate they were drugged on a steady, gradual, and continual basis."

"So you believe it was a case of premeditated poisoning?"

He broke out in a smile, revealing his gold teeth.

"No. Who knows, maybe the goblins are to blame, or maybe some flies were on their way back from raiding a pharmaceutical lab and happened to land on the victims' toast after tramping around in the latest derivatives of lysergic acid. But I do know that the process of accretion took place gradually"

"But what if it were an unknown compound?"

"Unknown to us?"

He said it in such a way that I couldn't help smiling.

"Yes. Unknown to you. To chemistry. Would that be impossible?"

He made a wry grimace and flashed the gold in his mouth.

"There are more unknown compounds than there are stars in the sky. But you can't have any that are both resistant and nonresistant to tissue metabolism. There are many circles, but there is no such thing as a squared circle."

"I don't follow you."

"Very simple. Chemical agents known to cause acute reactions act by binding irreversibly to the body's hemoglobin to form insoluble compounds with carbon monoxide or cyanide. An autopsy will always be able to detect the presence of such agents, especially if micro-methods are used-chromatography, for example. But even with the help of chromatography they couldn't find any traces! That means the chemical agent involved must be easily degradable. If it's easily degradable, then it would have to be administered in a number of small doses or else in one ma.s.sive dose. But if it were administered in a single dose, then the symptoms would start becoming noticeable in a matter of hours and not days. Now do you follow me?"

"Yes. Do you see any other possibilities?"

"There is one other. And that is if it involved some basically innocuous substance that began developing psychotropic properties the moment it started distributing itself in the blood or tissue. In the liver, for instance. To expel this substance the liver might convert it into a toxic agent. The result would be an interesting biochemical trap, though a completely hypothetical one, since nothing like that has ever been known to happen and I doubt whether it ever could."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because pharmacology has no record of such a toxin, of such a 'Trojan horse.' And if something has never been known to happen, the chances are slim that it ever will."

"So where does that leave us?"

"I don't know."

"Is that all you have to say?"

I was being impolite, but the man was beginning to get on my nerves. Even so, he didn't seem to take offense.

"No, that's not all. The effect could be the result of something else."

"A combination of different substances? Of different toxins?"

"Yes."

"But that would definitely make it a case of premeditated murder, wouldn't it?"

The answer came unexpectedly from Saussure.

"A girl from Lombardy was working as a housemaid for a certain Parisian lawyer living at 48 Rue St-Pierre, on the third floor. One day her sister came to visit her but forgot the name of the street, confusing it with St-Michel. When she came to 48 Boulevard St-Michel, she went upstairs, found a doctor's name-plate, rang the doorbell, and asked for her sister, Maria Duval. By sheer coincidence it turned out that a woman with the exact same name-Maria Duval-was working for another doctor, on another street, but was in fact somebody else entirely. Now in trying to determine the a priori probability of such a coincidence, we find it impossible to offer a rational, that is to say, mathematically valid explanation. The example may appear trivial, but, believe me, it opens up an endless void. The only model for the theory of probability is Gibbs's world of recurrent events. When it comes to unique and statistically uncla.s.sifiable' events, the theory of probability is inapplicable."

"There are no such things as unique events," said Mayer, who all this time had been standing there in amus.e.m.e.nt, grinning wryly.

"Of course there are," countered Saussure.

"At least not as a set."

"You happen to be a unique set of events yourself. Everyone is."

"Distributively or collectively speaking?"

Just when it looked as if we were in for a duel of abstraction, Lapidus placed a hand on each man's knee and said: "Gentlemen!"

Both men smiled. Mayer went on smirking with tongue in cheek while Sausure tried to pick up where he had left off.

"One can easily run a frequency a.n.a.lysis on the name Duval or the residences of Parisian doctors. But what's the ratio between confusing Rue St-Pierre with Boulevard St-Michel, and the frequency of these names as street names throughout France? And what numerical value do you a.s.sign to a situation in which the woman finds a house with an occupant named Duval but on the fourth, rather than the third floor? In short, the set of possibilities is limitless."

"But not infinite," interjected Mayer.

"I can prove it's infinite in both the cla.s.sical and the transfinite sense."

"Excuse me," I interrupted, wis.h.i.+ng to pick up the thread. "Dr. Saussure, I'm sure your story had a moral to it. What exactly was the moral?"

Mayer gave me a sympathetic glance and strode out onto the patio. Saussure seemed somewhat startled by my lack of perspicacity.

"Have you been out in the garden behind the summerhouse, out where the strawberry patch is?"

"Why, yes."

"Did you happen to notice the round wooden table standing there, the one trimmed with copper nails?"

"Yes."

"Do you think it would be possible to take an eye-dropper and squeeze out as many drops as there are nails so that each drop hits a nail head?"

"Well. . . if a person were to take careful aim, why not?"

"But not if a person just started firing away at random?"

"Then obviously not."

"But five minutes of a steady downpour and each nail would be sure to get hit by a drop of water."

"You mean to say . . ." I was beginning to see his point.

"Yes, yes! My position is an extreme one: there's no such thing as a mysterious event. It all depends on the magnitude of the set. The greater the set, the greater the chance of improbable events occurring within it."

"Then the victims do not really form a set. . . ?"

"The victims were the result of a random causality. Out of that realm of infinite possibilities I mentioned earlier, you chose a certain fraction of cases that exhibited a multifactorial similarity. You then treated these as an entire set, and that's why they seem mysterious."

"So you would agree with Mr. Lapidus that we should investigate the abortive cases?"

"No. For the simple reason that they would be impossible to find. The cla.s.s of soldiers stationed at the front includes the subcla.s.s of both killed and wounded. While these two groups can be differentiated easily, you'll never be able to differentiate those soldiers who came within an inch of being hit from those who missed being hit by a kilometer. That's why you'll never find out anything except by sheer accident. An adversary who relies on a strategy of chance can only be defeated by the same strategy."

"Are you at it again, Dr. Saussure?" came a voice from behind us. It was Barth, accompanied by a lean, grizzly-haired man whose name I failed to catch when we were introduced. Barth treated Saussure not as a member of his team but more as a curiosity. I later found out that until a year ago Saussure had been working for Futuribles before joining up with the French CETI investigating the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations, but that he had always been something of a drifter. I asked him whether he believed such civilizations existed.

"That's not so simple," he said, rising to his feet. "Other civilizations exist and at the same time do not exist."

"Meaning?"

"They do not exist as projections of our own concept of civilization, from which it follows that man is incapable of defining what makes these civilizations be civilizations."

"Perhaps," I conceded. "Still, it must be possible to define our place in the cosmos, don't you think? Either we're nothing but a drab mediocrity, or we're an exception, and a glaring one at that."

Our listeners broke out laughing, and I was surprised to learn that it was precisely this line of reasoning that had persuaded Saussure to quit the CETI. At the moment he was the only one not laughing; he just stood there, fingering his calculator as if it were a pendant. After luring him away from the others and maneuvering him over to the table, I offered him a gla.s.s of wine, poured myself one, and, while drinking to his version of civilization, asked him to share his views with me.

This was a shrewd tactic, one I'd learned from Fitzpatrick: affecting an air of seriousness bordering on parody. Saussure began by explaining that the progress of human knowledge was a gradual renunciation of the simplicity of the world. "Man wanted everything to be simple, even if mysterious: one G.o.d-in the singular, of course; one form of natural law; one principle of reason in the universe, and so on. Astronomy, for example, held that the totality of existence was made up of stars-past, present, and future-and their debris in the form of planets. But gradually astronomy had to concede that a number of cosmic phenomena couldn't be contained within its scheme of things. Man's hunger for simplicity paved the way for Ockham's razor, the principle stating that no ent.i.ty, no category can be multiplied unnecessarily. But the complexity that we refused to acknowledge finally overcame our prejudices. Modern physics has turned Ockham's maxim upside down by positing that everything is possible. Everything in physics, that is; the complexity of civilizations is far greater than that of physics."