Certain First Principles

He talked for three hours on the Friday afternoon in the room over the garage with the electric heater going and the window shut, and Nathan Sayre sat on an upturned crate with a legal pad on his knee and did not write more than nine lines, because after the first twenty minutes he understood that he was not being told anything and was being recruited.

"Start with what you had," Sayre said.

"I had an idea about looking at people."

"Say it properly."

"I had an idea about looking at people without cutting them open, which is not a cure, it is a camera, and if you want to know why a man spends nine years on a camera, the answer is that I grew up four blocks from a mill and my father died at fifty-six of something that four doctors looked at from the outside with a machine that cost two million dollars and could not see a thing." He paused. "That is true and it is also the story I tell. Here is the actual start. The actual start is that I was measuring the optical constants of tissue — you know this, you wrote the second half of the paper — and I was measuring them because nobody had done the whole set since 1972 and the 1972 numbers are wrong."

"And you found a difference."

"I found a spread. Nineteen samples, eleven of them the same organ. The index of the water in them was the same. The index of the solids was not. And I sat in a darkroom in Seattle for four days looking at a table with a spread in it, and on the fourth day I stopped seeing a problem with the measurement and started seeing a problem with the tissue."

Nathan Sayre said nothing. He had seen it too, that day, on a printout, in March, two years ago. It had taken him six hours to see it and it had taken Brandt four days only because Brandt had insisted on re-running the standards, which was the correct thing to do and which is why Brandt was the better scientist of the two of them and why Sayre had never once been able to pretend otherwise.

"Nineteen samples," Sayre said. "Eleven organs. Four days."

"Four days, and then the sentence: the body is not one medium, it is a suspension. It's four or five media with different indices, mixed, and everything you see is the light coming back off the boundaries between them. Which means — and here it is, this is the whole thing, this is the entire discovery, everything else is plumbing — which means that a body does not have to be transparent. It has to be uniform. Get every part of it to the same index as the air and the thing goes away, and it doesn't go away like glass goes away, it goes away like nothing goes away, because there is no boundary anywhere in it for light to bounce off."

"And the plumbing."

"Nine years of plumbing." He was talking more easily now; Sayre recognized the tone, it was the tone of a man at a whiteboard at eleven at night with two cans of something, and the fact that the tone survived at all after eleven days of what this man had been through was the most frightening thing in the room. "You can't dose a body with one thing. You dose it in stages, from the inside out, and the hard part is the order — skin first, then connective tissue, then muscle, then fat, then the eye, Sayre, then the retina, and while you are doing the retina you are blind, lying in a dark room with your hands in mitts, because light does the damage at exactly the wrong moment."

"The pain."

"The pain is not the chemical. The pain is the nerves coming back, and the nerves come back first, everything comes back in the reverse order you took it away, and the last two hours are the deep fascia, and I am not going to describe that and I would not wish it on a dog."

"But you did it to a dog."

"I did it to a dog," Brandt said, in the same tone, "on the nineteenth of October two years ago, and it lived for nine days, and the nine days are the reason I know the dose, and I am not going to stand in your garage and pretend about it. It was a beagle from a lab-supply list. I gave it the dose and it went grey and it went thin and it went out, and on the fourth day I could see its heart through its chest, and I sat in that room for four days and I would do it again, and I want you to hear me say I would do it again, because I want you to know exactly who is in your garage."

Sayre looked at the crate and at the legal pad and at the nine lines on it, and the nine lines said:

Uniform index, all media, reverse order, dark, retina last. 41 runs. Dog. Oct. 2024. Did not need the second exposure — the sequence is asymmetric. Journal retraction, June. Only one name. Mine. He is not frightened. He is pleased.

The last line he had written at four o'clock, and he had written it because it was the only note he had been taking that was not about the science.

"Here's the difficulty," Brandt said, "and here's why I came to you and not to a bank.

I made the mistake of being the first. I did it on myself on a Thursday in January with the reversal half-derived, because I had the first half in my hand and the second half on paper, and it was going to take four days to measure the second half and I did not want to wait four days. So I did the forward. And on the Saturday the second half of the sequence left the building, in a duffel bag, in a truck, driven by a man in Cedar Hollow, and it is currently in a motel room in Millvale or in a pawn shop in Eugene, and until I have it back I am what you see, which is a man who cannot eat in a restaurant, cannot walk in snow, cannot sleep where there is a dog, and"—he stopped, and then said the thing straight, which Sayre had been waiting for—"cannot be in a room with a child, because a child would look at the door and see it open."

"And the notebooks. You'll get them back."

"I will get them back, because he will sell them, and I will find the person he sells them to, and it will take eleven days, and in the meantime I need the room and the glass."

Something in the room had changed and Sayre had felt it change and could not name it, and then he named it: the man on the bed was no longer a man asking a favour. There was no helplessness anywhere in the voice anymore. The voice had found its floor and it was standing on it, and what it was standing on was a plan.

"Sayre," Brandt said. "You've been in this room for three hours waiting for me to ask you for something monstrous. I'm not going to. I'm going to tell you the news. There are, in the whole of this country, about four people who will ever understand the sequence, and one of them is a man on Ridgeline Terrace who is not going to do anything with it because his son can't see, and the other three are referees who have already read the retraction and decided what I am. The rest of the world, the entire rest of it, will go on being the world, and the world has a very specific way of dealing with a man it cannot look at."

"Which is."

"It pretends he isn't there," Brandt said, "until it can't. And then it beats him to death with a length of fence post in a parking lot. So here is what I am: I am a man who has been retracted, dismissed, unpersoned and made invisible in four separate ways in one year, and I am now — Sayre, I am now actually invisible, which means I am the one man in Oregon who can do exactly as he likes. And you are going to help me do exactly as we like, which is not the same thing, and which for the next six weeks will look like a biochemist with a bench. And after the six weeks —"

The heater ticked. Somewhere in the house, Toby Sayre was watching something with the volume low.

"After the six weeks," Brandt said, "there is going to be a man in this country who cannot be seen, who has all the notebooks and a laboratory, and I want you to think very hard about what that man is going to do, because I have thought about it every hour of every day since the second week above the Wayfarer Inn, and I have not been able to find a single thing that anybody could do about it. Not a cordon. Not a warrant. Not a dog. Not a thermal camera. Not a door."

Nathan Sayre put the pen down on the legal pad.

"You're telling me this because you've already decided to tell me," he said.

"I'm telling you this because you're the only person I have ever met who is genuinely good at the part I'm not good at, which is being seen," Brandt said. "Six weeks and you'll never hear my name again."

And Nathan Sayre said, "All right," and stood up, and went into the house, and at twenty past five he put his coat on and drove down into Millvale to the hardware store before it shut, and bought, at the counter, in front of a boy who had known him since he was a boy himself, four items off a list, and paid for them, and did not look at the list again, and the last item on the list was a box of fifty-nine-gallon trash bags, and he did not know why, and he had stopped being a man who asked.