In Free Fall(78)

“What do you want?”

It is not easy to answer this question. Schilf probably wants a new Rita Skura, one who is not thinking of her own career or of the walrus-mustached police chief, but only of how she can help the first chief detective superintendent in his mission for truth and justice. And he wants a slim librarian with hair that has been combed back, and a large room whose walls are lined with shelves of oak that go right up to the ceiling. He wants absentminded scientists who climb ladders to reach the volumes on the very top shelves. He wants green lampshades on antique desks.

Schilf is nauseated by the smell of the freshly cleaned carpet underfoot. Metal shelving divides the room into cells containing dark computer monitors. He is the only visitor. The conversation with Rita feels like rheumatism in his bones. He longs for a living being, for understanding and support, or perhaps just for the warmth of a freshly run bath.

“What do you want?” The librarian repeats herself slowly and clearly. She probably has to deal with confused foreign researchers quite often.

“Quantum physics,” the detective says.

The woman’s face shakes with silent laughter, and Schilf realizes that he has made a joke. He does not join in.

“Go ahead,” she says.

Schilf does not bother with the rows of books whose covers threaten investigations of the cosmological lambda term or the missing-mass problem. He sits down at one of the computers and types Sebastian’s name into the catalogue search function. The list is long. Schilf chooses two publications whose titles contain more familiar than unfamiliar words. He writes down the classification codes on a piece of paper and walks back to the desk. The librarian perches a pair of spectacles on her wide face and waddles over to a shelf of journals. The prim design of the booklets she pulls out would warn off any normal person from trying to read them. The librarian pats him encouragingly on the shoulder as she hands them over, and Schilf is left with his booty.

“Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation as the Foundation for Quantum Cosmology.”

“The Fluctuating Scalar Field, i.e.: The Eternal Return of the Same.”

Schilf makes a concerted effort not to wonder about the sense of this undertaking and whispers encouraging words to himself: Let’s just see, piece of cake, this. He starts reading the first article.

Since his phone call with Rita, he has been plagued by the feeling that he has no time left, and that whatever he does, he is neglecting something else far more important. His method does not work in such a situation. In order to look through things, to lurk and listen and wait for something to rise from the cellar of reality to the surface, he needs one thing above all: inner peace. Now he can only struggle to understand things with the usual tools of the trade, which will bring an average rate of success at best. His startled brain races along the words stretching across the pages like worms, staggers then falls, catches itself in the barbs of a semicomprehensible sentence (“Applied to the cosmos, the quantization machine leads to an assumption of general wave function”), and slides across the slippery ground of the next clause. It stumbles over a familiar phrase (“everything is possible and happens somewhere”) and ends up standing in front of the impenetrable wall of string theory and supersymmetry.

Schilf does not understand a word. He does not have the faintest idea what Sebastian is writing about. The pounding of his headache has turned into hammering. He puts the journal aside and rouses the computer. On the home page of the search engine he discovers a report on the re-arrest of the former chess world champion Kasparov. He feels a little better after reading this short article without any trouble. Filled with hope, he types Sebastian’s name into the gateway to the virtual world.

Two photographs immediately pop up under the heading Circumpolar. There is Sebastian’s boyish, laughing face, next to a striking man whom Schilf would have immediately cast as Mephisto if he were directing a film of Faust. The detective looks at the two men for a long time: the laughter and the silence, the wanting and the waiting, the white king and the black king. A two-headed oracle, the detective thinks. It is some time before he realizes what the Web page is actually offering. You can download an episode of the science program Circumpolar, subtitled “The Clash of the Physicists.” Schilf pulls his chair closer to the screen and clicks on “Watch Now.”

Sebastian and Oskar are seated on protruding chairs in the narrow prison of a small screen. The show’s host is sitting between them in a deliberately casual manner, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees as he introduces the program.

Twenty-first century. Challenges that no one had ever expected. The intersection between science and philosophy.