A Touch of Infinity Read online

  “I don’t truly follow you,” his wife replied patiently, “but does that mean you’re not going to build any more hoops?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Which means you are sure.”

  “No, it only means that I am not sure. I have to think about it.”

  His wife rose from the table, and the professor asked her where she was going.

  “I’m not sure. I’m either going to have a migraine headache or jump out of the window. I have to think about it too.”

  The only one who was absolutely and unswervingly sure of himself was the Mayor of New York City. For eight years he had been dealing with unsolvable problems, and there was no group in the city, whether a trade union, neighborhood organization, consumers’ group, or Boy Scout troop which had not selected him as the whipping boy. At long last his seared back showed some signs of healing, and his dedication to the hoop was such that he would have armed his citizenry and thrown up barricades if anyone attempted to touch it or interfere with it. Police stood shoulder to shoulder around it, and morning, evening, noon, and night an endless procession of garbage trucks backed across the Columbia College quadrangle to the hoop, emptying their garbage.

  So much for the moment. But the lights burned late in the offices of the City Planners as they sat over their drawing boards and blueprints, working out a system for all sewers to empty into the hoop. It was a high moment indeed, not blighted one iota by the pleas of the mayors of Yonkers, Jersey City, and Hackensack to get into the act.

  The Mayor stood firm. There was not one hour in the twenty-four hours of any given day, not one minute in the sixty minutes that comprise an hour, when a garbage truck was not backing up to the hoop and discharging its cargo. Tony Andamano, appointed to the position of inspector, had a permanent position at the hoop, with a staff of assistants to see that the garbage was properly discharged into infinity.

  Of course, it was only to be expected that there would be a mounting pressure, first local, then nationwide, then worldwide, for the hoop to be taken apart and minutely reproduced. The Japanese, so long expert at reproducing and improving anything the West put together, were the first to introduce that motion into the United Nations, and they were followed by half a hundred other nations. But the Mayor had already had his quiet talk with Hepplemeyer, more or less as follows, if Hepplemeyer’s memoirs are to be trusted:

  “I want it straight and simple, Professor. If they take it apart, can they reproduce it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they don’t know the mathematics. It’s not an automobile transmission, not at all.”

  “Naturally. Is there any chance that they can reproduce it?”

  “Who knows?”

  “I presume that you do,” the Mayor said. “Could you reproduce it?”

  “I made it.”

  “Will you?”

  “Perhaps. I have been thinking about it.”

  “It’s a month now.”

  “I think slowly,” the professor said.

  Whereupon the Mayor issued his historic statement, namely: “Any attempt to interfere with the operation of the hoop will be considered as a basic attack upon the constitutional property rights of the City of New York, and will be resisted with every device, legal and otherwise, that the city has at its disposal.”

  The commentators immediately launched into a discussion of what the Mayor meant by otherwise, while the Governor, never beloved of the Mayor, filed suit in the Federal Court in behalf of all the municipalities of New York State. NASA, meanwhile, scoffing at the suggestion that there were scientific secrets unsolvable, turned its vast battery of electronic brains onto the problem; and the Russians predicted that they would have their own hoop within sixty days. Only the Chinese appeared to chuckle with amusement, since most of their garbage was recycled into an organic mulch and they were too poor and too thrifty to be overconcerned with the problem. But the Chinese were too far away for their chuckles to mollify Americans, and the tide of anger rose day by day. From hero and eccentric, Professor Hepplemeyer was fast becoming scientific public enemy number one. He was now publicly accused of being a Communist, a madman, an egomaniac, and a murderer to boot.

  “It is uncomfortable,” Hepplemeyer admitted to his wife; since he eschewed press conferences and television appearances, his admissions and anxieties usually took place over the breakfast table.

  “I have known for thirty years how stubborn you are. Now, at least, the whole world knows.”

  “No, it’s not stubbornness. As I said, it’s a matter of duality.”

  “Everyone else thinks it’s a matter of garbage. You still haven’t paid the dentist bill. It’s four months overdue now. Dr. Steinman is suing us.”

  “Come, now. Dentists don’t sue.”

  “He says that potentially you are the richest man on earth, and that justifies his suit.”

  The professor was scribbling on his napkin. “Remarkable,” he said. “Do you know how much garbage they’ve poured into the hoop already?”

  “Do you know that you could have a royalty on every pound? A lawyer called today who wants to represent—”

  “Over a million tons,” he interrupted. “Imagine, over a million tons of garbage. What wonderful creatures we are! For centuries philosophers sought a teleological explanation for mankind, and it never occurred to any of them that we are garbage makers, no more, no less.”

  “He mentioned a royalty of five cents a ton.”

  “Over a million tons,” the professor said thoughtfully. “I wonder where it is.”

  It was three weeks later to the day, at five-twenty in the morning, that the first crack appeared in the asphalt paving of Wall Street. It was the sort of ragged fissure that is not uncommon in the miles of city streets, nothing to arouse notice, much less alarm, except that in this case it was not static. Between five-twenty and eight-twenty, it doubled in length, and the asphalt lips of the street had parted a full inch. The escaping smell caught the notice of the crowds hurrying to work, and word went around that there was a gas leak.

  By ten o’clock, the Con Edison trucks were on the scene, checking the major valves, and by eleven, the police had roped off the street, and the lips of the crack, which now extended across the entire street, were at least eight inches apart. There was talk of an earthquake, yet when contacted, Fordham University reported that the seismograph showed nothing unusual—oh, perhaps some very slight tremors, but nothing unusual enough to be called an earthquake.

  When the streets filled for the noon lunch break, a very distinct and rancid smell filled the narrow cavern, so heavy and unpleasant that half a dozen more sensitive stomachs upchucked; and by one o’clock, the lips of the crack were over a foot wide, water mains had broken, and Con Edison had to cut its high-voltage lines. At two-ten, the first garbage appeared.

  The first garbage just oozed out of the cut, but within the hour the break was three feet wide, buildings had begun to slip and show cracks and shower bricks, and the garbage was pouring into Wall Street like lava from an erupting volcano. The offices closed, the office workers fled, brokers, bankers, and secretaries alike wading through the garbage. In spite of all the efforts of the police and the fire department, in spite of the heroic rescues of the police helicopter teams, eight people were lost in the garbage or trapped in one of the buildings; and by five o’clock the garbage was ten stories high in Wall Street and pouring into Broadway at one end and onto the East River Drive at the other. Now, like a primal volcano, the dams burst, and for an hour the garbage fell on lower Manhattan as once the ashes had fallen on Pompeii.

  And then it was over, very quickly, very suddenly—all of it so sudden that the Mayor never left his office at all, but sat staring through the window at the carpet of garbage that surrounded City Hall.

  He picked up the telephone and found that it still worked. He dialed his personal line, and across the mountain of garbage the electrical impulses flickered an
d the telephone rang in Professor Hepplemeyer’s study.

  “Hepplemeyer here,” the professor said.

  “The Mayor.”

  “Oh, yes. I heard. I’m terribly sorry. Has it stopped?”

  “It appears to have stopped,” the Mayor said.

  “Ernest Silverman?”

  “No sign of him,” the Mayor said.

  “Well, it was thoughtful of you to call me.”

  “There’s all that garbage.”

  “About two million tons?” the professor asked gently.

  “Give or take some. Do you suppose you could move the hoop—”

  The professor replaced the phone and went into the kitchen, where his wife was putting together a beef stew. She asked who had called.

  “The Mayor.”

  “Oh?”

  “He wants the hoop moved.”

  “I think it’s thoughtful of him to consult you.”

  “Oh, yes—yes, indeed,” Professor Hepplemeyer said. “But I’ll have to think about it.”

  “I suppose you will,” she said with resignation.

  2

  The Price

  Frank Blunt himself told the story of how, at the age of seven, he bought off a larger, older boy who had threatened to beat him up. The larger boy, interviewed many years later, had some trouble recalling the incident, but he said that it seemed to him, if his memory was at all dependable, that Frank Blunt had beaten up his five-year-old sister and had appropriated a bar of candy in her possession. Frank Blunt’s second cousin, Lucy, offered the acid comment that the dollar which bought off the larger boy had been appropriated from Frank’s mother’s purse; and three more men whose memories had been jogged offered the information that Frank had covered his investment by selling protection to the smallest kids at twenty-five cents a kid. Be that as it may; it was a long time ago. The important factor was that it illustrated those two qualities which contributed so much to Frank Blunt’s subsequent success: his gift for appropriation and his ability to make a deal if the price was right.

  The story that he got out of secondary school by purchasing the answers to the final exam is probably apocryphal and concocted out of spleen. No one ever accused Frank Blunt of being stupid. This account is probably vestigial from the fact that he bought his way out of an expulsion from college by paying off the dean with a cool two thousand dollars, no mean sum in those days. As with so many of the stories about Frank Blunt, the facts are hard to come by, and the nastiest of the many rumors pertaining to the incident is that Frank had established a profitable business as a pimp, taking his cut of the earnings of half a dozen unhappy young women whom he had skillfully directed into the oldest profession. Another rumor held that he had set up a mechanism for obtaining tests in advance of the testing date and peddling them very profitably. But this too could not be proved, and all that was actually known was his purchase of the dean. It is also a matter of record that when he finally left college in his junior year—a matter of choice—he had a nest egg of about fifty thousand dollars. This was in 1916. A year later he bought his way out of the draft for World War I in circumstances that still remain obscure.

  Two years later he bought State Senator Hiram Gillard for an unspecified price, and was thereby able to place four contracts for public works with kickbacks that netted him the tidy sum of half a million dollars—very nice money indeed in 1919. In 1920, when Frank Blunt was twenty-four years old, he purchased four city councilmen and levied his service charge on fourteen million dollars’ worth of sewer construction. His kickback amounted to a cool million dollars.

  By 1930 he was said to be worth ten million dollars, but it was the beginning of a muckraking period and he was swept up in the big public utility scandals and indicted on four counts of bribery and seven of fraud. Frank Blunt was never one to count small change, and at least half of his ten-million-dollar fortune went into the purchase of two federal judges, three prosecutors, five assistant prosecutors, two congressmen, and one juryman—on the basis that if you are going to fix a jury, it’s pointless to buy more than one good man.

  One of the congressmen subsequently became a business associate, and Frank Blunt moved out of the scandal with clean hands and the receivership of three excellent utility companies, out of which he netted sufficient profit to more than replace his expenses for the cleansing.

  He often said, afterward, that his Washington contacts made during that time were worth more than the expenses he incurred in, as he euphemistically put it, clearing his name; and unquestionably they were, for he got in at the rock bottom of the offshore oil development, operating with the boldness and verve that had already made him something of a legend in the financial world. This time he purchased the governor of a state, and it was now that he was said to have made his famous remark:

  “You can buy the devil himself if the price is right.”

  Frank Blunt never quibbled over the price. “You cast your bread upon the waters,” he was fond of saying, and if he wanted something, he never let the cost stand in his way. He had discovered that no matter what he paid for something he desired, his superb instinct for investment covered him and served him.

  Politicians were not the only goods that Frank Blunt acquired. He was a tall, strong, good-looking man, with a fine head of hair and commanding blue eyes, and he never had difficulties with women. But while they were ready to line up and jump through his hoop free of cost, he preferred to purchase what he used. These purchases were temporary; not until he was forty-one years old and worth upward of fifty million dollars did he buy a permanent fixture. She was a current Miss America, and he bought her not only a great mansion on a hill in Dallas, Texas, but also four movies for her to star in. Along that path, he bought six of the most important film critics in America, for he was never one to take action without hedging his bets.

  All of the above is of another era; for by the time Frank Blunt was fifty-six years old, in 1952, he was worth more money than anyone cared to compute; he had purchased a new image for himself via the most brilliant firm of public relations men in America; and he had purchased an ambassadorship to one of the leading western European countries. His cup was full, and it runneth over, so to speak, and then he had his first heart attack.

  Four years later, at the age of sixty, he had his second heart attack; and lying in his bed, the first day out of the oygen tent, he fixed his cold blue eyes on the heart specialist he had imported from Switzerland—who was flanked on either side by several American colleagues—and asked:

  “Well, Doc, what’s the verdict?”

  “You are going to recover, Mr. Blunt. You are on the road.”

  “And just what the hell does that mean?”

  “It is meaning that in a few weeks you will be out of the bed.”

  “Why don’t you come to the point? How long have I got to live after this one?” He had always had the reputation of being as good as his name.

  The Swiss doctor hemmed and hawed until Blunt threw him out of the room. Then he faced the American doctors and specified that there was no one among the four of them who had collected less than twenty thousand in fees from him.

  “And none of you will ever see a red cent of mine again unless I get the truth. How long?”

  The consensus of opinion was a year, give or take a month or two.

  “Surgery?”

  “No, sir. Not in your case. In your case it is contraindicated.”

  “Treatment?”

  “None that is more than a sop.”

  “Then there is no hope?”

  “Only a miracle, Mr. Blunt.”

  Frank Blunt’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and for a few minutes he lay in bed silent, staring at the four uncomfortable physicians. Then he said to them:

  “Out! Get out, the whole lot of you.”

  Five weeks later, Frank Blunt, disdaining a helping hand from wife or butler, walked out of his house and got into his custom-built twenty-two-thousand-dollar sports car, whipped togeth
er for him by General Motors—he was a deeply patriotic man and would not have a foreign car in his garage—told his chauffeur to go soak his head, and drove off without a word to anyone.

  Blunt was not a churchgoer—except for weddings and funerals—but his flakmade image described him as a religious man whose religion was personal and fervent, and the wide spectrum of his charities included a number of church organizations. He had been baptized in the Baptist church, and now he drove directly to the nearest Baptist church and used the knocker of the adjacent parsonage. The Reverend Harris, an elderly white-haired and mild-mannered man, answered the door himself, surprised and rather flustered by this unexpected, famous, and very rich caller.

  “I had heard you were sick,” he said lamely, not knowing what else to say.

  “I’m better. Can I come in?”

  “Please do. Please come in and sit down. I’ll have Mrs. Harris make some tea.”

  “I’ll have some bourbon whiskey, neat.”

  Pastor Harris explained unhappily that bourbon whiskey was not part of his household but that he had some sherry that was a gift from one of his parishioners.

  “I’ll have the tea,” said Frank Blunt.

  The pastor led Blunt into his study, and a very nervous and excited Mrs. Harris brought tea and cookies. Blunt sat silently in the shabby little study, staring at the shelves of old books, until Mrs. Harris had withdrawn, and then he said bluntly, as befitting his name and nature:

  “About God.”

  “Yes, Mr. Blunt?”

  “Understand me, I’m a businessman. I want facts, not fancies. Do you believe in God?”

  “That’s a strange question to ask me.”

  “Yes or no, sir. I don’t make small talk.”

  “Yes,” the pastor replied weakly.

  “Completely?”

  “Yes.”

  “No doubts?”

  “No, Mr. Blunt. I have no doubts.”

  “Have you ever seen Him?”

  “Seen who?” the pastor asked with some bewilderment.