To Whom
all things concern
On the fourth of May Dr. Cooperstock defected and in the morning of the fifth Governor Hewlett telephoned me. "He's not back?" he said, and I said he wasn't, and Hewlett, pausing only a second, said, "Well. We can't wait any longer. The Army is moving in."
I went from my office to the operating room and I was shaking as I scrubbed in.
It was a splenectomy, but the woman was grossly fat, with a mild myocarditis that required external circulation. It took all of my attention, for which I was grateful. We were five hours in the room, but it was successful and it was not until I was smoking a cigarette in the little O.R. lounge that I began to shake.
Twenty-four nuclear bombs in twenty-four cities. And of course one of them, the one that we knew was ready to go off, was in the city I was in. I remembered the power plant, off in the Hudson River under the bridge, yellow brick and green glass. It was not more than a mile away.
And yet I was alive. The city was not destroyed. There had been no awful blast of heat and concussion.
I walked into the recovery room to look at the splenectomy. She was all right, but the nurse stared at me, so I went back to my office, realizing that I was crying.
And Nan Halloran was there waiting for me, looking like a drunken doll.
She pulled herself together as I came in. Her lipstick was smeared, and she shook. "You win, Martin," she said, with a little laugh. "Who would have thought old Coopie was such a lion? He gave me something for you."
I poured her a drink. "What happened?"
"Oh," said she. She drank the whiskey, politely enough, but showing she needed it. "Coopie came to Wayne and made a deal. Politics, he said, is out of my line, but you owe me something, I've helped you, I'll help you more, only you must promise that research will be free and well endowed. He had it very carefully worked out, the man is a genius." She giggled and held out her glass. "Funny. Of course he's a genius. So Wayne took the hook and said it was a deal, what was Coopie going to do for him next? And Coopie offered to show him how to convert the power plant to a different kind of bomb. Neutrons he said." So Dr. Cooperstock had taken the billionaire down into the guarded room and, explaining how it was possible to change the type of nuclear reaction from a simple hot explosion to a cold, killing flood of rays that would leave the city unharmed, if dead, he had diverted the hydrogen fuel supply, starved the reaction and shut off the magnetic field that contained it.
And then he had told Donner all deals were off.
There was nothing hard about rebuilding the field and restarting the reaction, of course. It only took a few days; but Donner no longer had days. "I told Wayne," said Nan Halloran gravely, draining her glass, "I told him he should wait until he had all the bombs ready, but he's—he was—he's still, but I think not for long, hard-headed. I have to go now, my plump friend, and I do thank you for the drink. I believe they're going to arrest me." She got up and picked up her white gloves, and at the door she paused and said, "Did I tell you? I've got so many things on my mind. Coopie's dead. He wouldn't let Wayne's doctors touch him."
They did arrest her, of course. But by and by, everything calming down, they let her go again. She's even starring in the movies again; you can see her whenever you like. I've never gone.
The letter in the envelope was from Dr. Cooperstock and it said:
I've pulled their fuses, Martin, for you and the Governor, and if it kills me, as you should know it must, please don't think that I mind dying. Or that I am afraid to live, either. This is not suicide. Though I confess that I cannot choose between the fear of living in this world and the fear of what may lie beyond it.
The leg is very bad. You would not even let me wear elastic socks, and for the past hour I have been crawling around the inside of Dormer's stainless-steel plumbing. It was really a job for a younger man, but I couldn't find one in time.
So I suppose these are my last words, and I wish I could make them meaningful. I expect there is a meaning to this. Science, as one of my predecessors once said—Teller, was it?—has become simpler and more beautiful. And surely it has become more wonderful and strange. If gravity itself grows old and thin, so that the straggling galaxies themselves weaken as they clutch each other, it seems somehow a much lesser thing that we too should grow feeble. Yet I do hate it. I am able to bear it at all, indeed, only through a Hope which I never dared confess even to you, Martin, before this.
When I was young I went to church and dreaded dying for the fear of hellfire. When I was older I dreaded nothing; and when I was older still I began to dread again. The hours, my friend, in which I held imaginary conversations with the God I denied—proving to Him, Martin, that He did not exist—were endless. And then, past Jehovah and prophets, I found another God, harsher, more awful and more remote. I could not pray to Him, Creator of the Big Bang, He Who Came Before the Monobloc. But I could fear Him.
Now I am not afraid of Him. A galaxy twenty billion years old has given me courage. If there was no monobloc there can have been no God Who made it. I live in the hope of the glorious steady state!
It was weak and wicked of me to give Donner a gun to point at the world, therefore, and I expect it is fair if I die taking it back; but it is not to save the world that I do it but to save my own soul in the galaxies yet to be born. For if the steady state is true there is no end to time. And infinity is not bounded, in any way. Everything must happen in infinity. Everything must happen . . . an infinity of times.
So Martin, in those times to come, when these atoms that compose us come together again, under what cis-Andromedan star I cannot imagine, we will meet—if there is infinity it is sure—and I can hope. In that day may we be put together more cleanly, Martin. And may we meet again, all of us, in shapes of pleasing strength and health, members of a race that is, I pray, a little wiser and more kind.
That was the letter from Dr. Rhine Cooperstock. I folded it away. I called my secretary on the intercom to tell her that his suite would now be free for another patient; and I went out into the spring day, to the great black headlines with Donner's name over all the papers and to the life that Cooperstock had given back to us all.