Gravitys Angel | Page 7

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 to talk right now."
"Sure," I said. "Go anywhere you want. In fact, I think I'll go for a
bicycle ride. I'll see you later." So moonlight flashed through the
bicycle frame as I rode the berm road above the SSC, and finally I
realized I had no answers to what perplexed me, and I turned around
and headed back toward home. I rode through streets of darkened
homes and came to my driveway, where a light burned on a pole,
walked the Invisible Bicycle up to the door, and went in to absolute
silence. On a low table in the living room, I found a note:
Dear Sax,
I have gone back to Los Alamos.
Don't worry about me, I'm fine. I just need to think about what
happened here.
Thank you for all you've done.
Carol
Over the next weeks, as the full-energy trials came closer, I thought

often about Carol Hendrix, her singularity, and the treatment she'd
gotten.
I went back to Thursday Group the next week but found I had little to
say to any of them-the whole bunch seemed strutting apes, obsessed
with their own importance and show. If they were interested in the truth,
and particularly in new, interesting truths, then why hadn't they treated
Carol Hendrix with the seriousness her ideas deserved? Her ideas were
strange, but important ideas always were. She was a woman, but so
what? How could that matter?
All of a sudden, I felt a fool. Their conversation excluded everyone not
a member of the group, and their masculinity, while entirely free of
conscious malice, effectively recognized only its own kind. A young,
small woman simply did not exist for them as a physicist to be taken
seriously.
I left early that evening and decided I would not go back.
But what I had seen at Thursday Group was everywhere at the lab.
Secretaries were women, scientists and administrators were men-white
men by and large, with a sprinkling of Orientals. Carol Hendrix was
right: I was incredibly naive. But I understood why. As a high-energy
physicist, I had been devoted to what I thought of as an unbiased search
for the truth, a search that creates intense tunnel vision-because of how
difficult it is, it demands absolutely everything you can bring to it, and
often that isn't quite enough. Now I had awakened, and what I saw
appalled and confused me.
I got one note from Carol Hendrix, apologizing for leaving so abruptly
and saying that she would write again when she had gotten her thoughts
straightened out. Then, five days before the first full-energy, high-beta
runs, she called me at the office. "Sax," she said. "I'd like to come
watch the runs. Would you mind?"
Carol leaned over me, slid her body down mine, pulled the gown over
her head. She was astride me, hands at her side as she moved in
rhythmic arcs. "The stars," she said. Through the window I could see

points of light strobing, red--and blue-shifting through the spectrum.
"Something is poking through behind them," she said. "It wants in." A
sheet of blue light poured through the window, burned through us,
x-raying flesh and bone. In it we were translucent, the intricate network
of our nerves burning in silver fire. We were fusing together, so close
to an orgasm that would annihilate us.
I woke, got up and drank some water for my burning throat, fell back
on the bed. I hung suspended between waking and sleeping as a flood
of images passed across my eyes. Bright, blurred shapes vanished
before I could see them clearly.
She was coming in the next day, the day before the first big runs.
She wore khaki shorts and a dark-blue T-shirt. We were sitting in my
backyard again, under a moonless sky--a thousand stars above us and
meteors cutting brief, silent arcs at the horizon. She sniffed at the glass
of cold Chardonnay she was holding, drank, and leaned back in the
reclining chair.
"I owe you an apology," she said. What do you mean?
"You did everything you could to help, and I walked out on you."
"You were troubled."
"I