Chapter #82Fane and Fortune by: Seuzz   There and Back Again.
The next day a private jet whisks you to England; a few hours after you arrive you in Cambridge. ou stare goggle-eyed at the architecture--old and new, tasteful and modern--and are dropped off in front of an ancient pile of turrets and buttresses. You are shown to a comfortable set of rooms and told to wait for Professor Hyde-White. There are a lot of books, but all they seem medical in nature, and so you've nothing to read or otherwise amuse yourself.
You've had a lot to think about, but nothing solid to get a grip on. Bob had said nothing to you, and Hyde-White had only mentioned "test results" and "new training." It's very odd, this interruption; you thought you'd been doing well. But it's clear that Bob's plot--using Blackwell and Casey to stage a cover story for the disappearance of the Libra--doesn't require your special presence. You can only hope that you fulfilled some obscure criteria, and that's why you've been pulled into a new situation.
You hope it doesn't involve Patterson. You wonder what's become of him.
After what seems a very long hour, the door opens, and Hyde-White comes in.
He's looking rather tired and harried, and his shoulders slump as he shrugs off an overcoat. His smile is rather thin as he greets you, and instead of inquiring after your health and your trip he merely sits in an easy chair with a sigh and opens his briefcase. He shuffles through papers, separating them into stacks on his knee or at his side, and slips on some half-rim glasses. You sit, to patiently wait.
The professor mutters to himself, and a few times checks his cell phone. "Would you believe--" he finally says, and looks over his glasses at you. For the first time he seems to genuinely notice you, and a look of weary amusement fills his blue eyes. "Would you believe they will pay for that Gulfstream that has been ferrying you about, but they will not pay to give me three more research assistants?"
The statement embarrasses you, but he seems not to notice, and just continues to shuffle papers. Eventually he gets them sorted to his satisfaction, returns them to his briefcase, and closes it. He sits back, crosses his legs, and regards you thoughtfully. "So, what do you think? Would you be satisfied with the new position?"
It's even worse than when Mr. Walberg would ask you for homework that you'd forgotten to do. You've done something very bad, you're sure, having misheard or forgotten to do something the professor or Bob asked of you. Color rises in your cheek, and you grin weakly. "Um-- I'm really sorry, Professor Hyde-White, but I don't know what the position is?"
The professor's eyes freeze, and he blinks. "Didn't Bob tell you about it," he skeptically asks.
Great. "He told me that I'm the fair-haired boy," you warily reply. Is that the position? Does that phrase mean anything?
The professor stares. "And that's all he said?" You nod weakly. The temperature in the room drops noticeably.
The professor stares some more at you, his mouth haggard. Then he looks away, mutters something, and re-crosses his legs. "Oh, very well. Perhaps it's best that I be the one to tell you."
"Did I do something wrong?" you ask.
"No, not at all. You're the blameless victim of intradepartmental politics is all." He purses his lips thoughtfully. "Yes," he murmurs, "it is probably best that it come from me."
He thinks a moment, and then becomes slightly more animated, offering you tea. You gratefully accept, and he steps into another room. To be polite, you follow to see if you can help. It's a small kitchen, and the professor fills a kettle from a tap and sets it on a low flame. He asks for your preference; you say you don't care; he gives you a wry glance, and gestures you to return to the sitting room. Some minutes later he joins you, giving you a cup and sitting again with one of his own.
"How much do you know about the history of science?" he asks. Not much, you confess. "Then I will give you the brief version.
"It starts with philosophy," he says, and leans back in his chair. "The Greeks. Aristotle systematizes it with lots of talk about substances and causes. There's some good, basic biology, but the physics is quite bad. Then stasis. The Arabs extend knowledge of astronomy and medicine a little; they and the Indians extend mathematics a great deal. There is a dark age in Europe, but it comes to life again in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Then they start questioning what they inherited from antiquity. Copernicus, Galileo, Leibniz, Newton, Descartes, other worthies show that Aristotle cannot explain many things. They begin to systematically take knowledge apart and put it back together again, using their wits, their brains, solid measurement techniques, and a hard-headed appreciation for evidence and experimentation."
He takes a long sip from his cup, and stares keenly at you over the rim.
"But then there is magic. You appreciate that there is such a thing, don't you, Mr. Prescott?"
You shrug, for of course you've seen and done some pretty weird things with masks.
"You're right to be noncommittal. There is no distinction between science and magic. It is all knowledge, to be explored and understood and given practical expression. There is no reason not to approach it in the same spirit with which Copernicus studied the motion of the planets, or Galileo and Newton the behavior of objects in motion. It is all grit for the mill."
You slurp a little from your own cup. What he says makes sense, you suppose.
"But there has been a long-standing prejudice against investigating magic. With good reason, I might add," he says, arching his brows. "Magic is quite dangerous, it's rather like playing with nuclear materials. Very bad things can happen if you don't know what you're doing, and for thousands of years people didn't know what they were doing. Imagine men in togas trying to take apart a hydrogen bomb, or seizing the controls of a 747 in mid-flight. That'll give you some notion of what it must have been like, the kind of disasters that must have occurred. For eminently practical reasons, what came to be called 'magic' was treated as forbidden knowledge, to be suppressed, and those who investigated it were persecuted. It was wise public policy, and if I had lived in the thirteenth century, or earlier, I should certainly have approved of the Inquisition, and might have gladly helped it out.
"But the problem was the manner with which it was approached. Unscientific, haphazard. Men in filthy robes fiddling with skulls and burning tapers. Few survived their experiments, for they did not understand how to keep themselves safe by approaching it cautiously, carefully. They did not treat their results with the proper degree of skepticism, and so leaped to conclusions both false and dangerous.
"But today we have the scientific method, and can study magic with the same assurance of safety and success with which we study, let us say, nuclear physics."
You refrain from muttering the phrases "Chernobyl," "Three Mile Island", and "Hiroshima," and continue to listen politely.
"But there is still that long-standing prejudice, and magic has mostly been forgotten over the centuries, so successful has its suppression been. The vast majority of scientists, and virtually all governments, know nothing of it, though they are aware of and investigate some very odd phenomena, which we might call 'magical'. But there are still organizations--mostly spiritual in nature, like the Church--that know of it, and suppress it. But there is no reason not to investigate it, except for the prudential reason that one might not want to call attention to oneself from our latter-day inquisitors. Does all this make sense to you?"
It does, mostly, and you say so--though after your own adventures you feel yourself suspending judgment on the wisdom of making such investigations.
"Good. Then I am now going to tell you a secret about Fane. We are in the business of investigating magic."
He holds your eye, to gauge your reaction. In truth, you have none. His confession does not surprise you in the least.
"Let me emphasize," he says, leaning forward, "that we are not wizards or cultists. We are scientists and engineers. That is all. We stand to magic--though I rather dislike that word, because of its connotations--as DuPont stands to chemistry. We investigate it, and master it, with an eye toward improving the lot of man. There are many dangerous, even deadly chemicals in the world. But you would not outlaw chemistry, or the businesses that traffic in them, would you? For without modern chemistry we would not have the modern world. We would be wearing scratchy clothes, plowing our fields with horses, and starving every few dozen years when the harvests failed. There would be no modern transportation or communications networks. Disease would be endemic and largely fatal. Without the marriage of chemistry and business, we would still be living in the Middle Ages.
"Fane's goal," he says in a rather stentorian way, "is to bring 'magic'--for lack of a better word--into the modern world in the same way and for the same reasons we brought chemistry into it. To create a world of power, knowledge, comfort and prosperity as far beyond our era as our era is beyond the Middle Ages."
He leans forward. "Will you join us, Mr. Prescott? Will you help us better the lot of mankind?"  You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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