One for the Road

I don't go to bars much. I don't even like most bars. Still, every now and then, like tonight, I'll want to put down a few drinks after work, to fortify myself for life in the haven of domestic tranquillity I call home. And I do know one fairly decent place, on a shady side street near the institute and the museum. It's quiet, dim enough to avoid the glare but not so dim as to become Hernando's Hideaway, drawing a clientele of professional people and technical people, with a scattering of footsore tourists.

I was all the way at one end of the bar, which was somewhat crowded tonight, and had just gotten outside my first solitary drink, staring glumly at myself in the mirror and feeling like Philip Marlowe during one of his whinier paragraphs, when the man came into the bar and sat down beside me on the only unoccupied stool.

He was wearing a well-cut but somewhat rumpled suit and wire-rimmed glasses, and his hair was just a bit longer than the modish nape-of-the-neck length that is now the mark of conformity. He was somewhere in his late 40s or early 50s, with one of those smooth, rubbery faces that made it difficult to tell which. I had seen that young-old face somewhere before, though I couldn't remember just where. He flagged down the bartender--who said something to him in the jocular tone that bartenders reserve for regulars--and was served a healthy double knock, which he immediately poured down his throat, all at once, as if it were iced tea. He set the glass down, had it refilled and tossed it off again. Then--while the bartender was pouring his third drink--he took off his wrist watch and held it up close to his face with both hands. "Five hours to midnight," he announced aloud to no one in particular, "more or less." He dived into his third drink. The watch he put carefully down on the bar in front of him. It was one of the newest and most expensive of digital watches, with more controls than the cockpit of a 747, and must have cost at least $500.

I had been watching all this out of the corner of my eye, mildly intrigued. He felt my eyes on him. He scowled, tossed down the rest of his drink and then turned his head toward me. "Do you know anything about quantum mechanics?" he asked in a conversational voice. "About the electromagnetic generation of instabilities? About runaway oscillation? About black holes?"

"Not a damn thing," I said cheerfully. My field is computer graphics.

"Good," he said. He fell silent, staring into his glass, and after a few moments, I realized that he wasn't going to say anything more.

"Why did you ask me that?"

"What?" he replied absently. He was staring at his watch in a preoccupied way, occasionally pinging the dial face with a fingernail.

"If I know anything about black holes."

He turned to look at me again, hesitated, and then called for the bartender to give him another drink. I let the bartender hit me again, too. When our glasses were full, he raised his to his lips but took only a small sip this time before setting it down again. "When I was at school," he said ruminatively, glancing at me again, "there was, appropriately enough, a rather sophomoric little game that we used to play occasionally at parties. It consisted of asking everyone there what they would do if they knew--knew without the possibility of a doubt--that the world was going to come to an end that evening. A stupid game, but if enough people answered, you began to notice some interesting patterns."

"Such as?" I said. My years as a doper had given me great tolerance for nonlinear conversations.

He smiled approvingly at me. "After a while, you'd notice that there were really only three basic answers to the question. Some people would say that they'd spend their remaining time screwing, or eating an enormous meal, or getting drunk, or stoned, or listening to their favorite music, or walking in the woods ... or whatever. This is basically the sensualist's reply, the Dionysian reply. Other people would say that they would try to escape somehow, no matter how hopeless it looked, that they'd spend their last moments searching frantically for some life-sparing loophole in whatever doom was posited--this is either the pragmatist's reply or the wishful thinker's reply, depending on how you look at it. The remaining people would say that they would try to come to terms with the oncoming doom, accept it, settle their own minds and try to find peace within themselves; they'd meditate, or pray, or sit quietly at home with their families and loved ones, cherishing each other as they waited for the end--this is basically the Apollonian reply, the mystic's reply." He smiled. "There was some blurring of categories, of course: Sometimes the loophole-seeking response would be to petition God to intervene and stop the catastrophe, and sometimes there would be a sensuous edge to the lavishness of the orgy of meditation the contemplatives were planning to indulge in ... but, for the most part, the categories were valid."

He paused to down about half of his drink, swishing it around in his mouth before swallowing, as if he were about to gargle (concluded on page 194)One for the road(continued from page 110) with it. "The next question we'd ask them," he said, "was even more revealing. We'd ask them: If you were the only one who knew that the world was about to end, would you tell anyone else? The mystics almost always said that they would tell, to give people time to prepare their souls; at the very least, they would tell those people they loved the most. Some of the loophole seekers said that they would tell, give everyone a chance to find their own loopholes; some said that they wouldn't tell, that their own chances for survival would be better if they didn't have to contend with a world-wide panic; and some said that they'd just tell a small circle of friends. Almost all of the sensualists said that they would not tell, that it was kinder if everyone else--and particularly their loved ones--could enjoy their last hours without knowing the shadow that was hanging over them--though at least one sensualist said that the only sensuous pleasure he would get out of the whole thing would be the fun of telling everyone else the bad news...."

Moving with exaggerated care, he polished off his drink and set it carefully back on the water ring it had made on the bartop. He turned to face me again. "Would you tell anyone, if you knew?"

I thought about it. "If I did, would there be anything anybody could do to stop it from happening?"

"Nothing at all."

"Any way that anybody could escape from it?"

"Not unless they can figure out a way to get clean off the planet in about five hours' time."

"In that case," I said, fingering my chin, "in that case, I don't think I would say anything."

"Good," the man said. "Then I won't, either."

He got up off the stool and strode out of the place, leaving his $500 watch on the bar.

The bartender drifted over to see if he could con me into a refill. "Who was that weirdo?" I said.

"Jeez," the bartender said, "I thought you knew him. That was Dr. Norman Fine, from over at the institute."

Then I remembered where I'd seen that young-old face: It had been staring at me out of a recent Time cover, accompanying an article that hailed Norman Fine as one of the finest experimental physicists in the world.

It's been about an hour now, and I keep looking at Dr. Fine's watch, toying with it, pushing it around on top of the bar with my finger. It's a damned expensive watch, and I keep thinking that soon he'll notice that it's gone, that he'll certainly come back into the bar for it in a moment or two.

But I'm starting to get worried.