A Hole in Texas

by Herman Wouk

Genres: Biographical; Literary Fiction; Satire

Synopsis

With this rollicking novel-hailed equally for its satiric bite, its lightly borne scientific savvy, and its tender compassion for foible-prone humanity-one of America's preeminent storytellers returns to fiction. Guy Carpenter is a regular guy, a family man, an obscure NASA scientist, when he is jolted out of his quiet life and summoned to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. Through a turn of events as unlikely as it is inevitable, Guy finds himself compromised by scandal and romance, hounded by Hollywood, and agonizingly alone at the white-hot center of a firestorm ignited as three potent forces of American culture--politics, big science, and the media--spectacularly collide.

Release date: April 13, 2004

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 288

Sample

1. THE PARTICLE PHYSICIST

We all have bad days, and Dr. Guy Carpenter awoke to rain drumming on gray windows, with a qualm in his gut about what this drab day might bring. Late at night an e-mail had come in, summoning him to an urgent morning meeting at the Jet Propulsion Lab with no reason given, an ill omen indeed to a survivor of the abort on the Texas plain. He was in pajamas at the desk in his den, gnawing at a slice of Swiss cheese on sourdough bread as he marked up a gloomy cost estimate of new space telescopes, when his wife burst in, her long black hair hanging in wet tangled ringlets, her soaked nightgown clinging transparently to her slim body. “Sweeney got out,” she barked.

“No! How, this time?”

“I took out the trash, that’s how. They collect it Wednesday at seven, or have you forgotten? It’s raining buckets, I hurried, I left the screen door unlatched, and the bastard slipped out. I tried to catch him and got drenched.”

“I’ll find him.”

“Don’t you have that meeting at seven-thirty? I’m wet through and stark naked, as you see, or I’d look for him.”

“No problem. Sorry about the trash.”

Dr. Carpenter threw on a raincoat and plodded out barefoot on slippery grass. The downpour was helpful. Sweeney hated the wet, so he would be holed up in some dry spot of the backyard instead of hightailing it over the fence for a major chase, and if that failed, a general neighborhood alarm. Penny’s obsession for keeping her cat indoors was a given of their marriage. Wonderful wife, Penny, with a human weakness or two such as a slight streak of jealousy and an unarguable dogma that outside cats were short-lived. Sweeney, a resourceful Siamese, ignored her for a doting fool, he knew he would never die, and he lay in wait for any chance to get out.

Poking here and there, Carpenter spied the bedraggled creature under a padded lounge chair. Okay, Sweeney! He crouched to grab the beast. Sweeney inched rearward just beyond his grasp, blinking at him. Standard cat maneuver, but this was no time for such foolery, so Carpenter kicked the chair aside and pounced on the cat. With an electric stab of pain, his back went out. Three weeks of slow healing, shot in an instant! He had pulled a muscle playing tennis, with an overhand smash at set point plunk into the net; and now this, no tennis for at least another three weeks. Standard Carpenter performance, he thought, clutching at his throbbing back. Guy’s colleagues regarded him as a top man in high-energy physics, his wife Penny adored him when he remembered to take out the trash, but he had a downbeat opinion of Dr. Guy Carpenter, due to a perfectionist bent always nagging at his self-esteem.

“Bad cat,” Penny said as he brought Sweeney in, meowing in outrage. Muffled in a bathrobe, she was drying her hair. “Good Lord, you’re drowned. I hope you didn’t catch your death. The Project Scientist phoned in a huge tizzy —”

“Call her back, say I’m on my way.”

Wincing at each move, he dressed, limped out to the garage, and eased himself into his car. When he pressed the garage-door opener, nothing happened. What now? Low battery? He lurched to Penny’s car and tried her remote. It did not work, either. The wall button goosed the door to rattle upward a foot, then it halted. He had never before tried using the manual lift. How did it work, exactly? He grasped the thick rough cord in both hands and with excruciating pain hauled the screeching door halfway up, where it stuck. His lower back aflame, pulsating, he called the Project Scientist on his cell phone to beg off from the meeting.

She was unsympathetic. “Guy, take a couple of Aleves. Peter’s on his way. Why don’t I alert him to pick you up? You’ve got to be here.”

“Why me, Ottoline? I’m crippled, I tell you —”

“You know more about the Superconducting Super Collider than anyone here.”

“The Super Collider? So what? It was killed back in ’93. It’s dead and forgotten.”

“Not anymore.”

“How’s that? For crying out loud, Ottoline, what’s up?”

“Not over the phone. I’ll page Peter and see you in a bit.”

Penny said, “Aleve, my foot,” and gave him two of her migraine capsules. “These will do the trick.”

“Codeine? I’ll be a zombie,” he protested, downing them.

“All the better. Don’t commit yourself to anything involving colliders.”

“Not with a knife at my throat.”

Soft soothing warmth gradually suffused his back as he waited for Peter Braunstein. Memories flooded him, memories long suppressed, released and made dreamily vivid by the opiate. Those years in alien Texas, years of working his heart out on that stupendous machine; years of the greatest fun and challenge in his life, and the worst frustration! He knew too much, that was the trouble. The monster might well have worked, but then again, every one of those ten thousand supermagnets had to function flawlessly, and they were his responsibility. He had fought in vain for more time, more careful designing, more testing. Hurry, hurry, national prestige at stake, get the thing going, then see! That was the word from on high, with unsubtle slurs about his foot-dragging —

“Guy?” Peter Braunstein on the cell phone. “I’m calling from my car. You okay?”

“I’ll live. What the devil’s going on, Peter?”

“I just asked Ottoline when she called me about you. She said, ‘Budget,’ and hung up. Be right there.”

Budget . . . The haunt of modern science . . . The delayed-action bomb that had sunk the SSC! The NASA budget review in Congress happened every year around this time. NASA supported the Jet Propulsion Lab, JPL supported the Terrestrial Planet Finder, and that project was Ottoline’s baby, so no doubt that was why she was on edge. Still, why the urgency? Their project had never yet run into a money problem. The Terrestrial Planet Finder was part of NASA’s Origins Program, which was exploring two grand questions about human existence:

 

(1) Are we alone? (2) Where did we come from?

 

A tall order, a noble endeavor, and their part of it was to search for signs of life on planets circling remote stars. The new space telescopes, if they could get the budget for them, would go a long way toward solving these riddles . . .

Honk, honk outside the garage. Stooping to pass under the half-raised door was pleasantly painless. Guy’s burly bearded tennis partner, a Cornell classmate and now an eminent astrophysicist, helped him into the high front seat of a battered camper. It was Peter Braunstein who, after the Texas debacle, had recruited Guy for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He said as he drove, “Well, let’s hope it’s NASA that’s getting the heat, not our project.”

“Peter, we’re small potatoes.”

“We’re NASA small potatoes, Guy. NASA’s been in trouble ever since the last Americans flew off the moon, you know that. No one big mission, a grab bag of dicey missions like ours, the media just yawn at the marvelous leaps ahead in space science, and every now and then a disaster throws the whole nervous bureaucracy into shock —”

“Go ahead, cheer me up,” said Carpenter. He was happy at JPL, proud of his work on the Planet Finder, and he tried not to think beyond his day-to-day work. For a high-energy physicist, relocating yet again at his age would be murder.

“Oh, Ottoline’s the worrier. I think we’ll be okay. It’s just that Congress is muttering more and more every year about money for NASA. Martian landscapes and floating astronauts are getting to be old stuff, Guy. Where’s the payoff?”

“A new more powerful bomb, you mean?” said Guy Carpenter. “Contact with aliens, maybe?”

“Something,” said Braunstein, swinging the car into the JPL parking lot.

2. THE CRISIS

Here we go,” said the Project Scientist as Guy Carpenter shuffled into her bleak windowless office, its gray-painted walls lined with discouraged greenery in long boxes. Peter Braunstein came in behind him. “Feeling better, Guy?”

“Passable.” His back was quite numb now, his brain thickly fogged by codeine.

“Okay, then. Tell them, Rafe.”

Lounging on a hard chair, his feet up on another chair, was the System Engineer, a short broad-shouldered Englishman in jeans and an old sweater. “Right. Gentlemen, the Chinese have got the Higgs boson.”

“What?” Braunstein all but yelled. Carpenter simply stared.

“You heard me.”

“The CHINESE?” said Carpenter.

Rafe chuckled, glancing at the Project Scientist. “The Chinese.”

“Ah, jokes.” Carpenter sounded relieved.

“You wish!” Ottoline’s face hardened. “That’s how I reacted at first. It’s very serious.”

“Ottoline, it’s inconceivable.”

“You’re here to tell us why,” she said, “and you’d better be convincing.”

“Oh, look, they haven’t got the machines, they don’t begin to have the technology—why, even the Europeans at CERN, when they shut down for an upgrade, admitted they were five years away from getting the Higgs.” He shook his head in disbelief. “The Chinese?”

“Stop saying that,” snarled the Project Scientist. “Yes, the Chinese!” Dr. Ottoline Porson was a big blonde in her fifties, with a huge behind, and gray streaks in her hair. She was one of America’s great astronomers. “Raphael knows what he’s talking about. Go on, Rafe.”

“I’m expecting a fax from London any minute,” said the System Engineer. “I got a call last night—late morning over there—and I phoned Ottoline straight off —”

“I took that call in the bathtub,” she put in. “I slipped in my hurry to get out and e-mail you fellows, darn near broke my neck —”

Carpenter demanded of the System Engineer, “Who called you?”

“Staff writer at Nature, to tell me that something bloody hot was in the wind.”

“Come on, Rafe.” A leak from the leading science journal in the world was a sobering surprise. “Are you saying that you have a mole at Nature?”

Raphael’s grin was a shade smug. “Female mole. Former girlfriend, truth to tell. Good science writer. We’re still on excellent terms. She’s the editor’s girlfriend now.”

“And she reported what?”

“An article has come in from the Chinese, so sensational that Nature is still debating whether to run it.”

Slumped in his chair, Guy Carpenter said slowly, “Is there coffee around? I’m not up to speed here —”

Peter Braunstein jumped up. “Coming, Guy.”

“Thanks, Pete . . . Ottoline, where shall I begin? They have no industrial infrastructure for such an effort. Not by miles. No scientists of outstanding calibre. Technicians by the horde, yes, but —”

“They’ve made ICBMs,” interrupted Ottoline. “They’ve exploded H-bombs.”

“Political stunts,” said Guy, “jump-started by the Soviets, when they were still friendly.”

“Wait, wait,” said Rafe. “You worked on an accelerator in China yourself, didn’t you?”

“Years ago. Primitive cyclotron. Department of Energy sent me over after Mao died, part of a detente that didn’t last. Fascinating country, beguiling people, but backward? Beijing was a city on bicycles.”

“That’s changed,” said Ottoline. “A lot has changed.”

Braunstein returned with the coffee. “Rafe, the fax in your office is chattering.”

“Here we go.” The Englishman hurried out.

Ottoline said, “Peter, Guy claims they don’t have the physicists to do the job.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Braunstein scratched his beard. “Just offhand, Guy, how about Liu Layu?”

“We know where Liu Layu is,” said Guy. “He’s heading their nuclear-weapons program.”

“You think we know where he is,” said Ottoline. “You’re talking about China, remember.”

“Then there’s Wendy,” said Braunstein.

“We know where she is too,” said Guy.

The Project Scientist shifted in her chair to look at Guy. “Wendy?”

“Wen Mei Li. She’s been kicked upstairs from high-energy physics to some big job in their Science and Energy Ministry. Or whatever they call it. She was in our physics program at Cornell.”

“Absolutely brilliant,” said Peter, looking to Carpenter. “Queen of the campus in those Chinese dresses of hers, with physics majors trailing her like baby ducks—why, even Professor Rocovsky had a case on her—but argumentative, prudish, never drank anything but water. She worked on the Stanford accelerator for a while, then went back to China —”

“Was she really that pretty?” asked the Project Scientist.

The hot strong coffee was clearing Guy’s head. “Look, Ottoline, are you regarding this as an emergency?”

“If Nature prints the article, yes indeed.”

“For our project?”

“Obviously.”

“Nothing’s obvious to me this morning. Explain why.”

“Guy, you worked on the Super Collider —”

“Yes, five and a half years of my life down the drain. So?”

“Could it be revived?”

Sipping coffee, Guy Carpenter took a long pause before answering. “Now listen, Ottoline, anything can be done, given the budget. The tunnel is still there in Texas, if that’s what you’re asking. About eighteen miles of it, and huge deserted buildings, and thousands of computers, and untold miles and miles of pipes and wires and magnets. If they haven’t been cannibalized or looted, that is. I’ve never been back. It was a tragedy, a catastrophe, a scientific Titanic. The Superconducting Super Collider is killed, murdered by Congress, gone forever. To get it going again might take eight to ten billion dollars, and even then —”

“‘Anything can be done, given the budget,’” she broke in. “Suppose it’s true? Suppose the Chinese have brought off an underground Sputnik? You weren’t here when I had to go before Congress on the Space Telescope because the mirror failed —”

“You did? But the astronauts fixed it, it’s a glorious success, it’s opening up the universe —”

“Fixing it took two years, Guy. The media staged a circus over the fuzzy mirror, and Congress had fits. You can’t predict what Congress will do when something like this surfaces and the media get hold of it. There’s only so much money for science every year, and —”

“Here you are, Ottoline.” Rafe strode in with a thick sheaf of paper. “The whole article. There’s a letter coming through too.” He darted out again.

She peered at the top page. “Evidence of Higgs Field Particle Detection —”

“Authors?” Guy asked.

She held the sheaf up to her eyes, removed her glasses, and squinted. “Wen Mei Li—aha, there’s your Wendy, gentlemen, leading off—Wu Kwang, Zhao Dapeng, Liu Layu —”

“Liu Layu also!” exclaimed Peter Braunstein.

Ottoline said, “This is a very poor fax. Blotchy. V. Abramovitch, I. Gorin. Goodness me, two Russians. That’s the lot.”

“How about it, Guy?” said Braunstein. “Wendy and Layu, plus a couple of Russkis. Interesting, would you say?”

Carpenter cleared his throat and spoke hoarsely. “Okay, the Russians have been ahead on titanium and niobium, we know that —”

The Englishman came back, waving a paper. “Well, it’s a cliff-hanger. They’re holding up the first August issue, and the editorial board is in special session right now, six in the evening in London. My lass will ring me when she hears something —”

“Whatever they decide,” Ottoline said, “I can see we’re already in trouble. This article”—she rattled the papers—“must have substance, and let’s even say they reject it. Nature once rejected an article by Fermi, you know. Someone here will grab it. American Scientist, Physics Today —”

“That’s for sure,” said Braunstein, “or Science —”

Ottoline’s voice went higher. “Someone! A stampede could start in Congress to revive the Super Collider, and that could gulp half of all science funding. In which case —”

“You’ve lost me, Ottoline,” interrupted the Englishman. “If the Chinese have already done it, where’s the sense?”

“I’m not talking sense, Rafe, I’m talking American politicians, press, and above all television,” said the Project Scientist. “And I’m talking budget. We’re not high on NASA’s mission chart, and —”

“As far as that goes,” interposed Braunstein, “we’re sucking hind tit.”

Ottoline gave him an arid smile. “Thank you, Peter, for defining the parameters —”

“Whatever happens,” said Guy, “we must have the orbiting telescopes, Ottoline, or the whole thing folds up —”

“No argument,” said Ottoline. “Therefore I’d like a memo from each of you on a possible long stretch-out of funding —”

The telephone rang. Rafe reached to snatch it. “Right, puss, what’s the word?” He nodded several times, glancing around somberly at the others, and hung up. “Nature is pulling two articles from the first August issue and featuring the Chinese bombshell on the cover.”

“Fat’s in the fire,” said Braunstein.

“This meeting is over,” said the Project Scientist. “Let me have those stretch-out memos, gentlemen, pronto.”

“One thing, Ottoline, about that fax,” said Guy, using his arms to push himself out of his chair. “Fax a copy right away to Rocovsky.”

“Rocovsky? His eyes aren’t that good. It’s hardly legible.”

“He’ll decipher it.”

Braunstein and Carpenter walked back to the camper in a light drizzle. “So, you’re really limping,” the astrophysicist said. “No tennis again for a while.”

“Guess not, Peter, and no volleyball tonight, that’s for sure.”

“Bummer. Caltech will cream us, then.” A team of faculty members played Jet Propulsion scientists once a year, at the birthday barbecue of a Caltech trustee on the lawn of his mansion. “Climb in, I’ll take you home.”

“Just to the mall, Saks entrance, Peter. I’ll get a cab from there.”

Braunstein glanced at him. “Saks?”

“Bit of shopping.”

When Braunstein’s camper left the mall, Guy Carpenter walked straight through Saks to a small dark post-office branch at the other entrance. There he filled out a form for relinquishing a PO box, and checked the box one last time. To his great surprise there was a letter, the first in half a year or more. Flimsy bluish paper, Chinese stamps. He took the letter to a window, read it slowly over and over, then tore it up into a trash basket. At a wooden stand-up desk he scrawled a long reply, mailed it, and turned in the form with the key.

When he got into the taxi, his back gave him a nasty twinge. Bad day. Bad, bad day. And far from over.

3. THE GAME

Bellows of laughter, shouted insults, and sporadic cheers rose from the guests crowding around the raucous moonlight volleyball game. Guy Carpenter looked on a bit apart, sidelined and silent amid drifting smells of fresh-cut grass and barbecued meat. In other years he had starred among these aging academics, a newcomer taller and faster than the rest, bounding around with white hair flying, making kills even from the baseline. Whacking at a ball—handball, tennis ball, volleyball, any ball, even a shuttlecock—did him good. He was an outstanding physicist, and he knew it; he also knew that physics was a game as well as a science, a blood sport played for the Nobel, in which he rated himself a clear cut or two below a Gell-Mann or a Rubbia. He blew off a fierce unreconciled head of competitive steam by slamming balls.

Piano music was starting up in the house. Penny already? Things must be dull in there. He went through open patio doors to the living room, where some guests chattered over plates of food and others clustered at the piano. Penny rippled a finish to “I Got Rhythm,” and with a private little grin at him began to play and sing in a husky contralto.

 

Busted flat in Baton Rouge

Waiting for a train —

 

She seldom played nowadays, since Dinah had erupted into their lives. For a woman of her age with a grown son, a new baby was a harassing handful. The older guests at the piano sang along, and Guy joined in, smiling back at her.

 

But I’d trade all my tomorrows, Lord, for just one yesterday

Of holding Bobby’s body close to mine. . . .

Da da da da da da da

Me and Bobby McGee . . .

Small summertime party at somebody’s house in a fancy part of Ithaca . . .

Collegiate crowd. Girl in a blue-and-white halter dress at the piano, singing and playing “Bobbie McGee” with more than a touch of Janis Joplin. Afterward Guy approaches her at the punch bowl. An undergraduate, by the look of her, and he is prematurely gray, but what the hell . . .

“That was nice, that ‘Bobbie McGee.’”

“Thanks.”

“You’re a student?”

Mischievous bright look. “Going for my master’s in microbiology. You?”

“Physics department.”

“Professor?”

Ouch. The gray hair. “Associate. Mainly I do research.”

Pause.

“My name is Guy.”

“I’m Penny.”

They sip punch, looking into each other’s eyes. On impulse he says, “Penny for the Guy.”

Her eyes boldly flash. “Mistah Kurtz, he dead.”

“Wow,” he says. “You read Eliot?”

“I read anything, randomly. Butterfly reader.” Off she goes into the party, leaving him surprised and impressed. Only weeks later does she confess that “The Hollow Men” is the only Eliot poem she’s ever read. Came on it in an anthology. Sharp cookie.

Was it cradle snatching? She was so much younger . . . eleven years . . . still, going for a master’s already—“Mistah Kurtz, he dead”— Lord, Lord, of all the vain musings! These thoughts recur whenever Penny sings “Bobbie McGee.” These thoughts, and others too . . .

Party breaking up. There she stands, looking around.

“Hi, can I take you home?”

“You sure can, thanks!” The tart smile that still enchants him. “My date ran into a girl he broke up with. They talked it over and left together. I guess he forgot me.”

“You’re not forgettable. He’s an idiot. Where do you live?”

And that was it . . .

A hand on his shoulder. “We miss you out there, Guy. It’s close.” Peter Braunstein held a large stein of beer in the other hand.

“I miss the game.”

“Go, Penny, go!” Peter bawled. Peter stayed out of the annual game to tank up on beer. “Say, Guy, wasn’t Ottoline a tad paranoid this morning about that Nature article?”

“Just responsible, Pete.”

“Well, maybe. And how about Wendy surfacing? Surprise, surprise.”

Penny was now pounding out a deafening “Pine Top’s Boogie.” Guy shook his head slightly at Braunstein, who rolled his eyes and barely muttered, “Oops.” At loose ends, Guy wandered back outside, feeling low, low, out of the game, his back giving him the devil, his livelihood once more hanging in the balance, if Ottoline was right. He fixed himself a boilermaker at the dim-lit movable bar, having learned in his worst Texas days that booze could be a friend in need, albeit a risky one. The game was tied at 12-12, when a Jet Lab player went down on the grass, groaning over a sprained ankle.

“Hey, look, there’s Guy!” someone yelled as the injured man was helped away.

“Guy, come on!”

“Guy, Guy!”

Chasing down the bourbon with a last swallow of beer, he plunged into the game, making one fast point and another, disregarding the electric stings in his spine. “Guy! Guy! Do it, Guy!” With a leaping net shot he clinched a win, shrugged off the cheers, backslaps, and handshakes, and limped back to the bar to swallow two Aleves with more bourbon. Unwise, but it worked. His agonized back calmed down, he ate another hamburger sizzling off the grill, and his mood turned quite rosy.

As they drove home Penny too was in cheery spirits, rattling on about the people at the party, and about the letter that had come in that day from their son in Australia. John was pursuing a PhD in anthropology, studying the art of the aborigines. Now he wrote that he might take a year off in Samoa, to dig into the quiescent controversy over Margaret Mead’s stuff on sex among the adolescents. Guy said that John’s way of hopping fro. . .