“There is a theory, which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
Sal tossed the Douglas Adams book onto his dorm bed. The man was creative, Sal remembered thinking as he swilled down the dregs of a warm Budweiser, but a scientific illiterate. It was only years later, when Sal had learned to take the long view, that he understood Adams’s genius. And it wasn’t until this season at South Pole Station that Sal realized how prescient Adams’s words were, how they seemed to speak specifically to this experiment, to this shutdown, to the appearance of Frank Pavano. After all, it was Adams who had heralded Pavano’s arrival into Sal’s life, because the moment Sal had tossed The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy onto his bed had also been the precise moment his new roommate had walked into their dorm room at Stanford’s Roble Hall. Gangly and skinny, with eyes wide and penetrating as an owl’s, the kid had stood there, frozen, unsure of what to say. By this time, Sal was familiar with the common anxieties of the nerd, so he reached between his legs and drew another beer from the six-pack. “They’re warm, but who cares, right?” he said, holding it out.
Down the hall, someone turned his boom box to maximum volume and indistinguishable heavy metal filled the hallways. This seemed to shake the kid out of his catatonia, and he stepped into the room and shut the door behind him.
“No, thanks,” he said, his voice as raspy as a two-string violin.
Sal shrugged and put the beer back. He wiped his hand on the leg of his jeans and stuck out his hand. “Sal Brennan.”
The boy set his duffel down gingerly, as if it contained a hundred Fabergé eggs, and cautiously shook Sal’s hand. “I’ve heard of you.” His gaze was unexpectedly direct, and it lasted too long.
“Everyone has,” Sal replied. “I’ve basically lived here since I was a toddler.”
“You’re Brennan’s son,” Pavano said.
“That’s me. You are?”
“Francis Pavano. You can call me Frank if you want.”
So this was the prodigy from Indiana whom his father had been stalking for the past four years. He had expected a dark-haired Italian kid, not this cut-glass automaton. So this, Sal thought, was what Midwestern genius looked like.
He slapped the bottom bunk he was sitting on. “I took this one. You okay with the top?”
Pavano nodded silently and picked his duffel up again. “Don’t you live in Palo Alto?”
“Born and bred.”
“Why are you living in the dorms?”
“I spend twenty out of twenty-four hours with my father. I need to be able to escape for the other four.”
Pavano nodded again and approached the bunk. Sal watched as he gripped the ladder and shook it, assessing its stability. Convinced it was structurally sound, Pavano set his bag on the desk under the window. He turned and gazed at Sal for a long, awkward minute. Finally, Sal took the hint. “I can come back.”
Pavano seemed greatly relieved by the offer. “Thanks, I’ll only be a minute.”
Sal took longer than necessary to leave. There was something about the kid that held him there. He wasn’t a thief. He wasn’t a pervert. He was a ninety-nine-point-ninety-niner. Behind heavy-rimmed glasses, his round, girlish eyes regarded Sal as if he were a bibelot catching the light. He was a Jehovah’s Witness without Jehovah, only the unsettling gaze of a witness.
Sal spent the afternoon at the physics building on Lomita Mall, where his father and the post-docs were feverishly trying to finish the last draft of a proposal for an independent lab, which had been in the works for a decade—it was going to be called Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, after the major donor, and was tentatively sited in Santa Barbara on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. Professor Brennan waved Sal into his office, where the other favored undergrads were going over data from an ongoing joint experiment at South Pole that would, it was hoped, eventually confirm that dark energy had driven the universe apart at accelerating speeds. Sal worked on the outputs for a while, but his mind kept returning to his strange new roommate.
“You’re distracted,” his father said without looking up from his computer, “and now you’re proving a distraction. What is it?” The other physics students looked up at Sal. He hated them—hated the way they quieted down whenever his father walked into the room, the way they guarded their words, the way they answered him with an upswing in their voice, as if they were unwilling, or afraid, to say anything with finality in his presence.
“Nothing,” Sal replied. Simultaneously, the undergrads turned to look at Professor Brennan. The professor kept his eyes on his computer screen. “Speak or leave,” he said. “I cannot have distractions.”
“Met my roommate today.”
At this, the senior Brennan looked over at his son. “Ah, so he’s arrived.”
“You know him?”
“Of course—I arranged it all with the bursar. Francis Pavano. We’re trying to coax him into particle physics. He’s a gifted science mind, Sal. We just need to convince him that inflation is far more interesting than plasma physics.”
“He wants to do heliophysics?” Sal asked, incredulous. “Matthews is a crank.”
“Your influence would be much appreciated.”
Sal groaned. “I have enough eccentrics in my life.”
“Please try to remember that in this world, you’re the outlier.”
Sal got back to work, but found, after a few minutes, that he still couldn’t concentrate. He looked over at his father, who was perusing the latest WMAP results. “Fine, I’ll talk to him, see if I can coax him away from Matthews.”
His father turned slowly from his computer and said, “Who?”
None of the students dared to look up from their work. “Pavano,” Sal said.
After a moment—no more than a second, but a second too long—his father nodded. “Yes, please do talk to him. Tell him more about Kavli. I imagine for someone of his caliber, it would be quite an inducement.”
When Sal returned to the dorm, the halls were quiet—it was dinnertime, and everyone had left for the cafeteria. When he unlocked the door and walked in, he saw that Pavano was standing at the window in front of a desktop easel, shirtless, his glasses atop his head. Pavano seemed unsurprised to see him.
“You okay, man?” Sal asked.
“I’m painting,” Pavano said, gesturing toward the canvas on his easel. “I hope that’s okay.”
Sal dropped his backpack under his bunk. “You paint?”