ing serious,” he said. “We just sat down and kicked some ideas of his around. I told him to go ahead. We’ve been-ah-using him very much like a sort of computer, you know. Turning him loose on the problems that were too tough for me and some of the other men. He’s got the itch for research now. It would be very interesting if his forte turned out to be creative.” I agreed. Julio didn’t come down for dinner. I woke up in darkness that night when there was a loud bump overhead, and went upstairs in my pyjamas. Gomez was sprawled, fully dressed, on the floor. He’d tripped over a footstool. And he didn’t seem to have noticed. His lips were moving and he stared straight at me without knowing I was there. “You “all right, Julio?” I asked, and started to help him to his feet. He got up mechanically and said: “-real values of the zeta function vanish.” “How’s that?” He saw me then and asked, puzzled: “How you got in here, Beel? Is dinnertime?” “Is four a.m., por dios. Don’t you think you ought to get some sleep?” He looked terrible. No; he didn’t think he ought to get some sleep. He had some work to do. I went downstairs and heard him pacing overhead for an hour until I dozed off. This splurge of work didn’t wear off in forty-eight hours. For a week I brought him meals and sometimes he ate absently, with one hand, as he scribbled on a yellow pad. Sometimes I’d bring him lunch to find his breakfast untouched. He didn’t have much beard, but he let it grow for a week-too busy to shave, too busy to talk, too busy to eat, sleeping in chairs when fatigue caught up with him. I asked Leitzer, badly worried, if we should do anything about it. He had a direct scrambler-phone connection with the New York Security and Intelligence office, but his orders didn’t cover anything like a self-induced nervous breakdown of the man he was guarding. I thought Dr. Mines would do something when he came-call in an M.D., or tell Gomez to take it easy, or take some of the load off by parceling out whatever he had by the tail. But he didn’t. He went upstairs, came down two hours later, and
absently tried to walk past me. I headed him off into my room. “What’s the word?” I demanded. He looked me in the eye and said defiantly: “He’s doing fine. I don’t want to stop him.” Dr. Mines was a good man. Dr. Mines was a humane man. And he wouldn’t lift a finger to keep the boy from working himself into nervous prostration. Dr. Mines liked people well enough, but he reserved his love for theoretical physics. “How important can this thing be?” He shrugged irritably. “It’s just the way some scientists work,” he said. “Newton was like that. So was Sir William Rowan Hamilton-” “Hamilton-Schmamilton,” I said. “What’s the sense of it? Why doesn’t he sleep or eat?” Mines said: “You don’t know what it’s like.” “Of course,” I said, getting good and sore. “I’m just a dumb newspaper man. Tell me, Mr. Bones, what is it like?” There was a long pause, and he said mildly: “I’ll try. That boy up there is using his brain. A great chess player can put on a blindfold and play a hundred opponents in a hundred games simultaneously, remembering all the positions of his pieces and theirs and keeping a hundred strategies clear in his mind. Well, that stunt simply isn’t in the same league with what Julio’s doing up there. “He has in his head some millions of facts concerning theoretical physics. He’s scanning them, picking out one here and there, fitting them into new relationships, checking and rejecting when he has to, fitting the new relationships together, turning them upside down and inside out to see what happens, comparing them with known doctrine, holding them in his memory while he repeats the whole process and compares-and all the while he has a goal firmly in mind against which he’s measuring all these things.” He seemed to be finished. For a reporter, I felt strangely shy. “What’s he driving at?” I asked. “I think,” he said slowly, “he’s approaching a unified field theory.” Apparently that was supposed to explain everything. I let Dr. Mines know that it didn’t. He said thoughtfully: “I don’t know whether I can get it over to a layman-no offense, Vilchek. Let’s put it this way. You know how math comes in waves, and how it’s followed by waves of applied science based on the math. There was a big wave of algebra in the middle ages-following it came navigation, gunnery, surveying, and so on.