Part 7 (1/2)

I sat down, feeling deflated. I decided to press on by indirect routes again. ”Do you not feel,” I asked him as he wrote, ”that there is some mismatch between the precision of mathematics and the inexactness of psychology and social science?”

Ryman looked up from his notes with an irritated expression, as if I had no right, at his own dinner table, to disturb him from his calculations. ”I am aware of the difficulties you describe,” he replied, directing his remarks to me with his pen as his wife served out vegetables.

”But I believe they can be overcome. Mathematical expressions may be applied usefully to all sorts of activities and study. Translating one's verbal statements into formulae compels one to scrutinise the ideas expressed therein. And the possession of those formulae makes it easier to deduce the consequences of one's original statement.”

I must confess I had to stifle a laugh at the highly formal manner in which Ryman expressed himself. ”When did you first begin to apply mathematics to this kind of material?” I asked the Prophet, trying in my tone not to reveal anything of my true intentions.

He smiled-still holding the pen poised, like someone taking the temperature of the air but with a medical thermometer. ”A long time ago. As a young man I had to find out for the Scottish Peat Company how channels in peat bogs should be cut, in order to remove the right amount of water. I realised that a broad-brush approach must be found, one that converted the exactness of differential equations into something more approximate.”

I knew about this part of Ryman's work. ”You relate changes in the y y axis to the small distances over which they occurred along axis to the small distances over which they occurred along x x.” After pouring on some gravy, I began cutting up my own chicken and eating.

Far from becoming suspicious, he seemed grateful that I was familiar with at least one area of his studies. ”That's right. And that became a way for me, in many spheres, for solving practical problems that do not lend themselves to smooth curves and continuous functions. But this kind of thinking has been at the heart of my weather work, too. For example, I ask you the question: does the wind have a velocity?”

It was a subtle question. It depended which part of the wind you were talking about; yet the wind was one thing, absolutely. Heaven's breath, but discontinuous as we humans experience it. ”Not an easy question to answer,” was all I said at first, while continuing to ponder the rich array of possibilities.

As I thought, I looked out of the window at the ridge above the cot-house, where the beech trees stood, dwarfed by the ma.s.sed dark green ranks of the firs of the forestry timber plantation higher up. There was something about the sky above the trees that threatened new weather.

”A line squall coming,” said Ryman, as if reading my thoughts. ”One hour.” He put back the notebook and pen in his pocket. Mrs Ryman and Grant were continuing to talk about religion.

”The wind's velocity...” I mused, crunching on a roast potato as I returned to his question. ”I suppose it all depends on what you measure-where and when you start, where and when you finish. The process of measurement must have a beginning and end. The establishment of those points has an effect on the outcome.”

He seemed satisfied by my answer. ”That's one way of putting it. The wind's velocity is not continuous, even if it might seem so as you stand at the end of a street and a gale howls past you. In fact the various parcels of air are being blown hither and thither. The function is jagged. So at the molecular level, we cannot say the wind has a velocity, even though we regularly measure wind speed with our instruments.”

As he spoke, he was cutting up his own chicken into equal-sized pieces. He then bisected each roast potato and severed his floret of cauliflower down the middle. It had a look of someone's brain.

”I wonder,” I asked, ”what on earth made you leave Cambridge? I mean, the s.p.a.ce in which to think, the facilities...”

”Too many people-I like to work alone, following little-used tracks, testing out my own theories with small-scale practical experiments. Take the peat. I could only satisfactorily determine its porosity as it lay in the bog, using peat's own original structure.” He lifted up his water gla.s.s. ”So I made an apparatus. A cup of peat...I carefully cut it out of the sod with a narrow-bladed knife, then I put water inside and noted the rate at which it ran through.”

Grant's voice rose at the other end of the table. He was still explaining something about evil and the war to Mrs Ryman, poor woman. ”G.o.d, in himself, does not cause wars. He takes no pleasure in the extinction of the living. It is the devil's envy which brings death into the world, as those who follow him will discover.”

Silence fell on the table. Out of the window through which Ryman had been staring, the trees looked black. They moved with the clouds that hurried by beyond them. Inside the room, the minister's rheumy gaze settled on Ryman, and the two men looked at each other for a moment.

It seemed the duel of views was set to continue, and this time the professor took up the challenge in good heart. ”I think I have shown, Minister, that religion itself is the worst cause of war. Followed by the armaments industry.”

”I thought you were a Quaker!” said Grant in a tone of hurt exasperation.

Ryman smiled in response. ”I am, but a biological one. I think G.o.d is the accusative of the verb to wors.h.i.+p-the addressee of a biologically necessary process.” A gleam came into his eyes. ”So don't say, ”Lift up your hearts!” Say, ”Reorganise your hypothalami!” Now, if you'll excuse me I must go to the loo.”

We sat in silence for a few seconds before Grant spoke. ”Given he has such opinions, it is strange the professor comes to church at all, Mrs Ryman.”

The colour rose in her cheeks. ”My husband is rather outspoken. I apologise. It's hard to explain. I am a Quaker, he is a scientist. He shares with me and all true Christians a yearning towards something larger and better than ourselves.”

I was amused at this outbreak of piety but, watching her speak, something else fizzed and sparkled through my brain-or through that still deeper place where emotions, thoughts and feelings join in a single experience. It was a perception that there was something beautiful about Gill Ryman. It had to do with the line of her jaw as she was speaking, the incline of her head, the way her lips parted over white teeth as the words came out.

As I was entertaining these speculations, Ryman returned, which provided the opportunity for Grant to resume battle. ”So how would you define faith?” he asked bluntly, as the professor sat down.

”Believing in a vacuum,” Ryman replied, just as bluntly. ”Ignoring the evidence. Waiting till enough people develop the same conviction.”

”There is no need for an argument,” I interjected. ”I am sure, Professor, that the minister does not want to be like those Victorian bishops who condemned Darwinism any more than you would want to exclude all spirituality from human affairs. I'd like to ask some questions about your work.”

Ryman took off his spectacles. ”I am sure you would,” he said. ”But now is not the time.”

I looked at Gill Ryman and she looked down, plucking three times at her napkin. ”I should fetch the pudding,” she said, standing up to go to the kitchen.

I also rose. ”Excuse me.”

”Don't flush,” called Ryman to my back. ”We don't flush unless it's visually necessary!”

Pa.s.sing a lamp and table in the hall, I climbed the stairs to the toilet. Below, I could hear Gill moving pots in the kitchen and Ryman and Grant resuming their argument. It didn't, in my opinion, seem to bring either of them closer to what they desired, which I suppose was scientific truth on the one hand and divine revelation on the other. I found the ding-dong faintly exhausting-but where would mankind be without disagreement? Without that grand family row between organisms and then species and then inherited human traits (harmful or helpful as we see them in retrospect), without that complex of conflicts known as natural selection, we'd have remained a lump of mucus in a prehistoric fjord-invertebrate, hardly possessing cells, oozing silent juices instead of language.

I pushed open the door to the lavatory.

Twelve.

Ryman's urine was still in the bowl. It was the colour of pale wheat. The whole room was filled with the savoury scent of it. The toilet was of the German or Danish type used for stool-gazing. I mixed my water with his and flushed the chain, watching the eddies evolve.

Hearing a shout from downstairs, I cursed softly as I stepped out onto the landing. I'd forgotten not to flush. There was something automatic about the way one's hand went to the handle.

The door to Ryman's study was ajar, and I could not resist the temptation to step inside. The walls of the room, which was fairly large, were lined with labelled box files. I baulked at the idea of rifling through his papers. For one thing, there were far too many of them. Those on the desk, I could see at once, were weather charts and tables of algorithms.

So he hadn't really stopped meteorology completely; Sir Peter was right to think he was continuing his programme.

I was acutely conscious of my hosts downstairs, just floorboards and a ceiling away. But I could not resist the safe, its door inexplicably open. Inside were two book-sized typescripts. I flicked through them, hoping to find any mention of the Ryman number. But they were both to do with his peace studies. One was ent.i.tled Arms and Insecurity: A Mathematical Study of the Causes of War Arms and Insecurity: A Mathematical Study of the Causes of War, the other was the Statistics of Deadly Quarrels Statistics of Deadly Quarrels which he had mentioned. which he had mentioned.

I looked at the books on his shelves: Batchelor, Prandtl, Napier Shaw, everything you'd expect in a meteorologist's library. There was also a small open cupboard with pieces of string hung across, on which were suspended a number of pairs of spectacles. They were all identical to the ones he was wearing. On the cupboard frame were some faded labels-20, 30, 50, 100 cm-showing the working distance for which each pair of spectacles had been designed. I chuckled at all this. Was there no area of his life to which Ryman did not apply his zeal for cla.s.sification?

On a small oak table to the side of the writing desk stood some scientific instruments, including a bra.s.s microscope and a system of rotating pivoted rods. I spun the weighted rods. Their purpose seemed to be the demonstration of the conservation of angular momentum. Very important thing, which one sees in skaters and dancers. But its most important proof is astronomical. The way the planets wheel round, waiting to come into alignment.

Fretting that I would be missed downstairs, I quickly scanned the white labels of the box files for anything relating to the Ryman number.

Solving Boundary Problems by Surface Integration.

Atmospheric Stirring.

Wind above the Night-Calm at Benson.

Quant.i.tative Estimates of Sensory Events.

All these labels were written out in Ryman's neat hand.

Then I saw it. Between The Deferred Approach to the Limit The Deferred Approach to the Limit and and Chaos, International and Inter-molecular Chaos, International and Inter-molecular was a box marked simply was a box marked simply Number Number.

Was this what Sir Peter was looking for?