Gravitys Angel | Page 6

Hendrix knew her audience. She had gone into sexless mode as much as possible. Her face was pale and scrubbed, no makeup, and she wore baggy tan trousers and a plaid wool shirt-in short, the closest approximation she could get to what the men in front of her were wearing. From her first words, she spoke calmly and authoritatively, for they'd listen to nothing else from her, and allowed none of the passion I'd heard to animate her presentation.
She gave it all to them, dealt it out on a screen in the front of the room. The slides came up showing perky pictures from The Thing, equation sets from QUARKER, annotations in her own hand: Each idea led straightforwardly to the one after, theory and practice brought together with casual elegance.
Leaving the last slide's END SIMULATION on the screen, she summarized: "We know little about the physical attributes of a singularity; in fact, its essential nature is lawless." She stopped, smiled. "Though we would anticipate its interactions with the nonsingular world of spacetime to be governed by the usual conservation laws, this may not be the case. In short, the consequences of creating a singularity are not well understood, and I would suggest that further analysis is required before any experiments are undertaken that could bring such a peculiar region of spacetime into close proximity with instruments so delicate as those in an experimental area." She paused and looked at them all, said, "I will be glad to hear your questions and comments."
This is where it will happen, I thought. Guests to Thursday Group often got taken on the roughest intellectual ride of their lives, as this group of brilliant and aggressive men probed everything they had said for truth, originality, and relevance-or the converse. I went very tense, waiting for the onslaught to begin.
"Dickie Boy," Bunford said. If this group had an alpha male, Bunford was it. He was a big man--around six-three and more than two hundred pounds--with a strong jaw, a lined face, and sunburned skin. He had elaborated the so-called Standard Model in new and interesting ways--the "semi-unbound quark state" was his particular interest-and the smart money had it that he and his group could pick up a Nobel if the SSC found the interactions he was predicting. "Did you validate her simulations?" Bunford asked. Rather an oblique approach, I thought, probably in preparation for going for the throat, theoretically speaking. Carol Hendrix turned to see how Dickie Boy would answer.
"Sure," Dickie Boy said. "Very sweet, very convincing. Take for instance the series of transforms ..."
"Fine," Bunford said. And to Carol Hendrix: "Thank you. If Dickie Boy validates your Monte Carlos, I'm sure they're well-done." He paused. "The physics is interesting, too ... though quite speculative, of course."
And he stopped there, apparently having finished.
I waited for him to go on, but he didn't-he was whispering quietly to Hong, one of his group members. And no one else was saying a word. Finally, Allenson stood from the pillow where he'd been sitting cross-legged and said, "Shall we make it an early evening tonight? I don't know about you guys, but I could use some sleep." He turned to Carol Hendrix and said, "I'd like to thank our guest for speaking to us this evening." Murmured voices said much the same thing. "At a later time, perhaps we can discuss the implications of this work, but this week we are all very busy getting the SSC up to spec."
Carol Hendrix stood white-faced and silent as all the men got up, nodded good-bye to her, and left, some alone, others in small groups of their colleagues.
"I don't understand," I said. We were walking along one of the suburb-like loops that led from Allenson's house to mine. For the present, many of us lived in Texlab-owned housing as a matter of convenience. "They didn't even want to argue with you."
"I'm an idiot," she said. "I forgot some of the most important lessons I've ever learned. In particular, I forgot that I'm a woman, and anything I say gets filtered through that."
"Do you really think that?"
"Sax, don't be so fucking naive. Why do you think they were polite? Because I was a visitor?' Her voice was filled with scorn; she knew as well as I did what treatment visitors got.
"Your conclusions are radical. You can't expect them to assent right off."
"I'll grant you that, and it would have been hard to convince them of anything substantive, but I could have begun tonight. They dismissed me, they dismissed what I was saying. Bastards. Smug male bastards-it's no wonder they can't hear anything; they're so filled with their own importance."
We stood in front of my house. She said, "I think I'll walk around for a while, if that's all right. I don't want