Dante’s Equation

She was weary of the argument, weary in general. She hadn’t been feeling at all well. And she still had another class today; then they had to go over to her place this afternoon to check the control group.

“What if…” Nate began, “what if there are probabilities?”

Jill shook her head. “Totally lost.”

“What if there is free will? But what if ‘free will’ or ‘no predestiny’ only means that there’s some kind of probability curve that one thing will happen versus another? Say this kid who was driving the truck, for example.” He waved his hand toward the newspaper. “Say his lifetime is fifty percent determined by pure genetics and maybe another thirty percent by environmental conditioning. Then there’s this last twenty percent that’s dumb luck. Maybe he could die at five from diving off a swing set because he’s got a recklessness gene, or at nineteen from an overdose because he’s predisposed to addiction. Or maybe there was always a chance he would have an accident while driving drunk.”

Jill rubbed her forehead tiredly.

“I’m not saying the pulse pushed him off. But what if it upped the probability of that particular event coming to pass? What if some random lucky thing, like a favorite song coming on the radio to keep him alert, could have happened last night—if a full crest had been there in his wave pattern—and didn’t, because that crest wasn’t there?”

She stared at him dumbly. “Nate, how do I respond to something like that?”

Nate shrugged sadly. “I don’t expect you to. I’m not even sure I believe it. I just think—I think we have no idea what we’re playing with.”

She leaned back against a table and hugged herself, feeling cold. She studied him for a moment. “You should take some time off.”

“No.”

“Just a few weeks. You can work on the data over in my office. For the report.”

From having been afraid of losing him a few minutes ago Jill realized that she was now pushing him out. She wanted him to go. Because there was something she was even more afraid of losing than Nate Andros: her own faith in the work or even the work itself.

But Nate slumped in surrender. He went back over to his computer and picked up his coffee cup. “Christ, I don’t want time off. I just want to talk about it, for god’s sake. I mean, sometimes this thing blows my mind.”

She heard a quiver in his voice and watched his face darken as he stared down into his cup. She felt a lump in her own throat in response but quelled it. A heartbeat later, she was mentally logging his increase of instability, of emotionalism, of paranoia for her journal entry later that night.

“That’s all the more reason to finish quickly,” she said crisply. “Let’s try to get the data up to fifty percent differential between our lab group and our control group on the negative one pulse. That’s good enough for publication. We can stop there.”

Nate didn’t answer or even glance at her.

“So… what happened with Linda?”

The words were out before she realized they were coming, and she immediately felt as though she’d just done something particularly humiliating. She compensated by looking supremely uninterested in the answer, checking her fingernails. She could feel him watching her.

“We didn’t have much in common when it came right down to it.”

“Huh.” She turned away, perversely pleased. “Are you sure you don’t want some time off? I would like to bump it up. But if you’re not comfortable with that you don’t have to be down here. Just say the word.”

His mouth twisted wryly. “No.” Then, harder, “And leave you to hog all the glory? Not unless you have a team of wild horses I don’t know about.”

Jill smiled.

8.3. Aharon Handalman

It was Friday afternoon, and Ha

It was growing dark when Aharon arrived, their guest in tow. Ha

“It’s, um, nice of you to invite me,” Binyamin said. “Rabbi Handalman said it was your idea.”

“You’re very welcome.” Ha

She had coached the children to be especially nice, yet Devorah wrinkled her nose as she sat at the table. “It smells!” she said, which Ha

When the food was on the table, Aharon said the blessing: “Baruch atah Adonai…”

From under her lashes Ha

It used to be if you were charitable you called Aharon assured, and if not so charitable pompous. When he’d prayed he’d had a solidness about him, as if to say, This is who I am and who my father was and my father’s father, as if he had a shortcut to God’s ear. That man was gone. Aharon went through the motions, mouthed the syllables. He might have been reading a grocery list. The worst thing was, she didn’t even think he was aware of the change, didn’t think he had any clue about the distracted blankness in his eyes or the fact that at times he had a look there that was pure panicky fear. He slept badly, had nightmares, rose so late she knew he would have little time for his morning prayers, and he didn’t even seem to care.

The mealtime crawled under the weight of forced conversation. Binyamin, who would never be any girl’s idea of a prince, was also no chatterbox. Fortunately, he was a quick eater. He finished two platefuls in record time, and no one else was hungry. Ha

The older two children were excused. Ha

The playground was small, only swings and a slide that even Devorah had nearly outgrown. Ha

She came around the side of the building, paused against the wall. She could barely hear the men’s voices. Aharon’s usually carried well, god knew, but he was speaking without much energy.

“Last night I dreamed I was trying to hide Yehuda at the yeshiva because the Nazis were plundering in the streets. They were knocking down the Wall, and if I didn’t hide Yehuda they would find him. I had him by the hand, and I was racing through the school when suddenly there was a brilliant flash in the windows. It was the weapon. I knew it, in the dream; I thought: The Nazis got the weapon, somehow, and they’ve destroyed Jerusalem!”

“It was just a dream, Rabbi.” Binyamin’s boyish voice was uneasy but also unexpectedly kind.