A Model World. Michael Chabon

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СКАЧАТЬ all resembled his own, than to the burden of the prose, and now he found himself entranced. It was a creative, dogged, well-supported, even ingenious argument, and he felt a surge of custodial pride at the boldness of Dr. Kemp’s mind. Levine had suspected—it had come to him in a dream, in fact—that Antarctic winds held the key to controlling the dreamy movement of clouds, but he had never really gotten beyond this one intuition. And here it all was! Laid down in charts and statistical tables, with almost a dozen sources that were entirely new to Levine. There was a massive Soviet study of cationic Antarctic winds, undertaken during the International Geophysical Year, which Levine had somehow missed, and there were as well the priceless results of three trips that Dr. Kemp had himself made to the Antarctic, aboard the Hodge, in 1963 and 1968. The argument and its advocate were made all the more poignant by the fact that the region in which Kemp had made the crucial measurements was the Bay of Whales, not far from Little America, on the Ross Ice Shelf—a region that had broken off from the continent in 1987 and was now melting. The Bay of Whales was no longer to be found on the map.

      (“Isn’t that going to be a problem with your committee?” I asked him that night as we were on our way to dinner at Professor Baldwin’s. “Basing your whole theory on evidence that no longer exists?”

      (“That’s all you guys do,” he said—which stung me. I was engaged at that time in the observation of those subatomic particles, such as muons, that lead very short lives. I protested that evanescence itself was in a way the object of my studies—But I’m getting ahead of the story.)

      It was nearly sundown when Levine finished his dissertation. His eyes were strained, his back and his neck hurt, but there was a sweet taste in his mouth, for he had regained his faith in the stoic nobility of scientific endeavor, and his regard for the austere beauty of its method. His New Mexican plans, the tinkling of wind chimes in a sonorous breeze, all his months of fruitless research, were forgotten. He had never wanted to be anything but a scientist. He leapt to his feet and dashed out into the gray little Gradplex living room, furnished with only a stereo and a folding aluminum and rubber-lattice lawn chair. His roommate, a graduate student in English, had been expelled from the university earlier in the month, after brawling with a professor over the supposed ties to Benito Mussolini of a female Italian semiotician who was an old girlfriend of the professor’s, and now Levine had the place to himself. He lay down on the hard gray carpet and allowed the knuckles of his spine to crack and relax. A breeze blew in from the patio, through the screen door, and ruffled the hair on his damp forehead. Levine thought, as he had not since high school, about the way the breeze was composed of a trillion trillion agitated molecules that he could not see. He thought, with the wondering pedantry of a sixteen-year-old boy, about the way every object around him, including himself, his body, was made of invisible things. He got up, grinning foolishly, and went to the telephone.

      Julia Baldwin, the wife of the head of his committee, answered the phone. “What is it?” she said.

      “Is Professor Baldwin in?” said Levine, momentarily filled with doubt.

      “Just a minute.” There was the sound of the receiver rattling as she let it drop. “It’s another one of your god-damned students,” he heard her say. Professor Baldwin mumbled something apologetic to her and then said hello.

      “I’m sorry to interrupt, Professor Baldwin,” said Levine. “It’s just—Well, I’ve been looking into solstitial winds at Ross, and I think—I think I may have stumbled onto something really big. And, well, it kind of scares me, sir, it’s so big. I’d kind of like to talk to you about it, if that’s all right.”

      “We’re having company, Levine,” said Professor Baldwin. “One of my wife’s instructors is coming to dinner. What is it, this big, scary thing?”

      Levine filled him in briefly on the nature of Kemp’s argument for Antarctic models, without of course saying anything about Dr. Kemp. He said that in his opinion a practical method of cloud control was now ten years closer than it had been yesterday. At first Professor Baldwin interjected such comments as “Yes, yes,” and “I see,” but when Levine had finished he was silent for a long time. Levine could hear Mrs. Baldwin, beautiful Julia, shrieking with laughter in the background.

      “Perhaps you’d better come over,” said Professor Baldwin. “I’ll have to ask Julia. Hold on.”

      Levine jumped up and down while he waited and watched the last red pennant fade from the evening sky. One of the things he loved best about meteorology was that its domain encompassed sunsets.

      “Come in an hour,” said Professor Baldwin. “It’s fine. In fact, my wife has suggested that you invite your friend Smith. We have a whole salmon.”

      “Thank you,” said Levine. “I’ll call him.”

      It was, of course, this same Julia, or Jewel, Baldwin for whom I had hoped to find that volume of Franco-Egyptian dramatic theory, and I told Levine that I would be more than happy to accompany him.

      There were coyotes out laughing and looking for pussycat in the foothills above the Facuplex when Levine and I came up the driveway to the Baldwins’ house on Froebel Lane. This entire neighborhood, with its skinny new trees on their crutches, its fresh-rolled lawns, its streets named for famous educators, had not been here six months before, and Levine and I had often walked up, carrying our binoculars and a six-pack of beer, to a couple of flat boulders that had stood not far from the present site of the Baldwins’ Japanese station wagon. Among a few other things, we shared a soft spot for birds and small animals, although he knew far more about them than I, and we had once been enchanted by the sight of two red rattlesnakes, somewhere in the vicinity of the Baldwins’ front door. I reminded Levine of this.

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