“Occasionally,” Pavano said. “It’s just a hobby.”
Sal walked over to where Pavano was working and looked at the painting. The canvas was daubed in bright, almost blinding white oil paint. A tidy black line split the painting neatly in half. Sal took a step closer and squinted. The left half of the canvas was blank. The right half of the canvas was filled with tiny equations and mathematical formulas. Sal recognized Euler’s equation, standard-model Lagrangian, an attempt to render infinite pi—the typical doodlings of a mathematics nerd in love with the most elevated equations in the discipline. He was about to walk away from the canvas when he spotted it: unmistakable in its beauty and impenetrability.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. The Riemann hypothesis, which extended Euler’s zeta function to the entire complex plane. Sal had lost interest in the distribution of the primes when he was in junior high, but it remained one of the great unproved theorems—any mathematician recognized it the way others would recognize a stop sign at an intersection. Still, it struck Sal as overly fussy that Pavano had included it in whatever was sitting on the easel. No, it was more than that. It seemed a desecration.
“What do you think?” Pavano asked.
“What do I think? I think it’s the work of a beginner,” Sal said. “A beginner painter and a beginner mathematician.”
Pavano gazed back at Sal, his face a pale lake. Sal sat down at his bunk. The painting haunted the room like a squatter, whose presence was impossible to ignore. He knew he was being a dick, and he wasn’t sure why, but seeing the Riemann on Pavano’s canvas disturbed him. It was like seeing a classmate doing a nude life study of his mother.
“Put on a fucking shirt, man,” Sal said. Pavano complied immediately, retrieving his shirt from the back of his chair. “I hear you want to go into heliophysics.”
“I’m considering it.”
“You know, heliophysics is like one step up from cybernetics,” Sal said, glancing over at the painting again. “And Matthews is a fringe-riding lunatic who is only here because he’s a fossil.” Pavano remained impassive. “My father says you turned him down. Why?”
“I have my reasons.”
Sal scoffed. “You think choosing Matthews over my father is the best course of action?”
Pavano paused uncertainly. “I do.”
“Why?”
Again, Pavano hesitated. “I don’t think Professor Brennan can meet my needs as a scholar.”
Sal laughed. “My father will win the Nobel prize when they find b-modes, and they will.”
“It’s not that. It’s that…” Pavano looked at Sal for a moment before turning away.
“What is it?”
“It’s just that—I’ve spent a great deal of time with your father now, and I believe he’s suffering from some form of dementia. Early stages, of course, but it’s there. I saw it most vividly last spring when I spent that weekend with the department.”
Sal gripped the edge of his bunk. Something deep in his brain told him to run, to leave the room as quickly as possible and pretend he hadn’t heard what Pavano had just said. But he was immobilized. “My father is the top theoretical physicist in the world, you idiot.”
“Yes, of course,” Pavano said quietly. “But Matthews agrees with me. As do other members of the faculty.”
Sal realized he was now standing. His body ached with rage. He wanted to wrap his hands around Pavano’s skinny throat, crush the protuberant Adam’s apple, hear vertebrae crackle beneath his fingers. Pavano took a step back. When he saw Sal stalking toward him, he retreated even farther until he was up against the cool cinder-block wall.
Sal’s eyes fell on Pavano’s Riemann hypothesis again, and, without thinking, he grabbed the canvas off the easel and put his foot through it, throwing the ruined painting at Pavano. It landed with a thud. Pavano’s eyes—freakish and clear as glass—merely gazed back at him.
Sal returned to the physics building that night. It was deserted, but the lab was, as always, open. He spent two hours going over the day’s data coming in from the South Pole Telescope, but found it hard, once again, to concentrate. He hated Frank Pavano with every cell in his body—hated his unnaturally smooth face, his hollow cheeks, his cavernous, simian eyes. He hated how his father had pursued him with a cupidity that was embarrassing, and which stimulated in Sal persistent envy.
Mostly, he hated that Pavano was right.
*
Somewhere, melted snow dripped down an exterior wall; Sal could hear the quiet growl of Bozer’s snow mover digging out the construction site. The roar of machines had diminished to occasional animal-like noises as Bozer, Marcy, and Floyd struggled to keep both the station and the site from being buried. Sal missed the din. Hearing the discordant sounds of construction had been a comfort to him over the last seven months. Here, in the lab, the sounds of progress were less straightforward—in fact, they were damn near inaudible. The only proof you were getting closer to the truth, it seemed, was the chatter of an overworked desktop computer with a stuck spindle.
His laptop pinged, and Sal scooted his chair past Alek to look at his e-mail. It was another message from the NSF. It was, like all of the missives since the occupation had begun, marked URGENT. Sal forwarded it to Dwight without reading it, same as all of the other e-mails he’d received from government agencies. He would deal with the fallout later. Right now, he had to take care of this.
Alek had fallen asleep sitting up. Sal stepped past him again and lay down on the floor. The inflationary paradigm is fundamentally untestable. Hence, it’s scientifically meaningless. Sokoloff had said this so many times that Sal had told him it was going to be his next tattoo. As he stared at the ceiling, he tried to convince himself that his mentor was right, that they could play the uncertainty card and keep the cyclic theory on life support. But wasn’t that exactly what Pavano and his ilk were doing? Promoting doubt in the face of uncertainty? Five-sigma, they’d found. Less than one chance in 3.5 million that those b-modes—those curls—were a random occurrence. Less than one chance in 3.5 million that the universe hadn’t unfolded exactly the way the inflationists said.