Jim Baen's Universe

Science Fiction Stories

Great Minds

Written by Edward M. Lerner

Illustrated by Paul Campbell

"It's very much as I expected," the intruder said without preamble.

Entering my cozy den, I had encountered him seated in my massive leather wingchair, shoes up on my broad mahogany desk, savoring one of my Cuban cigars. A snifter of brandy rested on the leather blotter, within his easy reach. The aroma was Napoleonic.

As I was unsurprised to find him. "Please, don't get up."

"You're very gracious." He grinned. The smile was world-famous: toothy, and slightly off-kilter. I saw it every morning in the mirror. Not that there weren't differences. There always were: in haircut, clothing style, glasses instead of contacts, whatever. I found his sideburns curiously short. "I mean considering."

Considering, as we both knew, he was here to take my life. Leather squeaked as his feet swung from the desk and he straightened his posture. Getting down to business. "The greatest minds of the millennium could not reach a common understanding what the math meant." Meaning: He couldn't have been expected to figure it out.

He was a whiner, a self-justifier—for which I was grateful. That character flaw was the only reason I was still here. He was also wrong. Proof by counterexample: I had decided I would solve the puzzle. Eventually, he had made the same choice. And, in our own times, in our respective ways, each of us had been successful.

His over-rehearsed rationalization tumbled out. "Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, Pauli, von Neumann, Schrödinger, Planck … them and more. Giants. You know the list. They never agreed on the physical significance of the math. Who was I to hope to understand the reality underlying the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics?"

Meaning: He lost hope, and somehow it became justifiable that I should pay the piper.

"And so for a long time, I gave up. I denied the problem. My career went another way." He paused for a sip. "But for years, for decades, I could not help but wonder. Every day, billions of transistors demonstrated some underlying truth to the theory. Quantum mechanics describes something. I had to know what."

His non-smoking hand, when not busy with the consumption of my best brandy, darted from time to time to pat something unseen in his coat pocket. It seemed to give him confidence.

"And so you returned to physics." I had never left it.

He admired the many plaques and photos gracing the darkly paneled walls of the room. "And so I realized,