(From “The Psychodynamics of the M-Set,” by Edith and Donald Craig, in Essays Presented to Professor Benoit Mandelbrot on his 80th Birthday: MIT Press, 2004.)
‘Are we paying for the dog, or the pedigree?’ Donald Craig had asked in mock indignation when the impressive sheet of parchment had arrived. ‘She’s even got a coat of arms, for heaven’s sake!’
It had been love at first sight between Lady Fiona McDonald of Glen Abercrombie — a fluffy half-kilogram of Cairn terrier — and the nine-year-old girl. To the surprise and disappointment of the neighbors, Ada had shown no interest in ponies. ‘Nasty, smelly things,’ she told Patrick O’Brian, the head gardener, ‘with a bite at one end and a kick at the other.’ The old man had been shocked at so unnatural a reaction from a young lady, especially one who was half Irish at that.
Nor was he altogether happy with some of the new owners’ projects for the estate on which his family had worked for five generations. Of course, it was wonderful to have real money flowing into Conroy Castle again, after decades of poverty — but converting the stables into computer rooms! It was enough to drive a man to drink, if he wasn’t there already.
Patrick had managed to derail some of the Craigs’ more eccentric ideas by a policy of constructive sabotage, but they — or rather Miz Edith — had been adamant about the remodeling of the lake. After it had been dredged and some hundreds of tons of water hyacinth removed, she had presented Patrick with an extraordinary map.
‘This is what I want the lake to look like,’ she said, in a tone that Patrick had now come to recognize all too well.
‘What’s it supposed to be?’ he asked, with obvious distaste. ‘Some kind of bug?’
‘You could call it that,’ Donald had answered, in his don’t-blame-me-it’s-all-Edith’s-idea voice. ‘The Mandelbug. Get Ada to explain it to you someday.’
A few months earlier, O’Brian would have resented that remark as patronizing, but now he knew better. Ada was a strange child, but she was some kind of genius. Patrick sensed that both her brilliant parents regarded her as much with awe as with admiration. And he liked Donald considerably more than Edith; for an Englishman, he wasn’t too bad.
‘The lake’s no problem. But moving all those grown cypress trees — I was only a boy when they were planted! It may kill them. I’ll have to talk it over with the Forestry Department in Dublin.’
‘How long will it take?’ asked Edith, totally ignoring his objections.
‘Do you want it quick, cheap, or good? I can give you any two.’
This was now an old joke between Patrick and Donald, and the answer was the one they both expected.
‘Fairly quick — and very good. The mathematician who discovered this is in his eighties, and we’d like him to see it as soon as possible.’
‘Nothing I’d be proud of discovering.’
Donald laughed. ‘This is only a crude first approximation. Wait until Ada shows you the real thing on the computer; you’ll be surprised.’
I very much doubt it, thought Patrick.
The shrewd old Irishman was not often wrong. This was one of the rare occasions.
16 THE KIPLING SUITE
Jason Bradley and Roy Emerson had a good deal in common, thought Rupert Parkinson. They were both members of an endangered, if not dying, species — the self-made American entrepreneur who had created a new industry or become the leader of an old one. He admired, but did not envy them; he was quite content, as he often put it, to have been ‘born in the business.’
His choice of the Kipling Suite at Brown’s for this meeting had been quite deliberate, though he had no idea how much, or how little, his guests knew about the writer. In any event, both Emerson and Bradley seemed impressed by the ambience of the room, with the historic photographs around the wall, and the very desk on which the great man had once worked.
‘I never cared much for T. S. Eliot,’ began Parkinson, ‘until I came across his Choice of Kipling’s Verse. I remember telling my Eng. Lit. tutor that a poet who liked Kipling couldn’t be all bad. He wasn’t amused.’
‘I’m afraid,’ said Bradley, ‘I’ve never read much poetry. Only thing of Kipling’s I know is ‘If — ‘ ‘
‘Pity: he’s just the man for you — the poet of the sea, and of engineering. You really must read ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’; even though its technology’s a hundred years obsolete, no one’s ever matched its tribute to machines. And he wrote a poem about the deep sea cables that you’ll appreciate. It goes:
‘The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar —
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.’
‘I like it,’ said Bradley. ‘But he was wrong about ‘no echo of sound.’ The sea’s a very noisy place — if you have the right listening gear.’
‘Well, he could hardly have known that, back in the nineteenth century. He’d have been absolutely fascinated by our project — especially as he wrote a novel about the Grand Banks.’
‘He did?’ both Emerson and Bradley exclaimed simultaneously.
‘Not a very good one — nowhere near Kim — but what is? Captains Courageous is about the Newfoundland fishermen and their hard lives; Hemingway did a much better job, half a century later and twenty degrees further south. . . .’
‘I’ve read that,’ said Emerson proudly. ‘The Old Man and the Sea.’
‘Top of the class, Roy. I’ve always thought it a tragedy that Kipling never wrote an epic poem about Titanic. Maybe he intended to, but Hardy beat him to it.’
‘Hardy?’
‘Never mind. Please excuse us, Rudyard, while we get down to business. . . .’
Three flat display panels (and how they would have fascinated Kipling!) flipped up simultaneously. Glancing at his, Rupert Parkinson began: ‘We have your report dated thirtieth April. I assume that you’ve no further inputs since then?’
‘Nothing important. My staff has rechecked all the figures. We think we could improve on them — but we prefer to be conservative. I’ve never known a major underwater operation that didn’t have some surprises.’
‘Even your famous encounter with Oscar?’
‘Biggest surprise of all. Went even better than I’d expected.’
‘What about the status of Explorer?’
‘No change, Rupe. She’s still mothballed in Suisun Bay.’
Parkinson flinched slightly at the ‘Rupe.’ At least it was better than ‘Parky’ — permitted only to intimate friends.
‘It’s hard to believe,’ said Emerson, ‘that such a valuable — such a unique — ship has only been used once.’
‘She’s too big to run economically, for any normal commercial project. Only the CIA could afford her — and it got its wrist slapped by Congress.’
‘I believe they once tried to hire her to the Russians.’
Bradley looked at Parkinson, and grinned. ‘So you know about that?’
‘Of course. We did a lot of research before we came to you.’
‘I’m lost,’ said Emerson. ‘Fill me in, please.’
‘Well, back in 1989 one of their newest Russian submarines — ‘
‘Only Mike class they ever built.’
‘ — sank in the North Sea, and some bright chappie in the Pentagon said: ‘Hey — perhaps we can get some of our money back!’ But nothing ever came of it. Or did it, Jason?’
‘Well, it wasn’t the Pentagon’s idea; no one there with that much imagination. But I can tell you that I spent a pleasant week in Geneva with the deputy director of the CIA and three admirals — one of ours, two of theirs. That was . . . ah, in the spring of 1990. Just when the Reformation was starting, so everyone lost interest. Igor and Alexei resigned to go into the export-import business; I still get Xmas cards every year from their office in Lenin — I mean Saint Pete. As you said, nothing ever came of the idea; but we all put on about ten kilos and took weeks to get back into shape.’
‘I know those Geneva restaurants. If you had to get Explorer shipshape, how long would it take?’
‘If I can pick the men, three to four months. That’s the only time estimate I can be sure of. Getting down to the wreck, checking its integrity, building any additional structural supports, getting your billions of glass balloons down to it — frankly, even those maximum figures I’ve put in brackets are only guesstimates. But I’ll be able to refine them after the initial survey.’
‘That seems very reasonable: I appreciate your frankness. At this stage, all we really want to know is whether the project is even feasible — in the time frame.’