36 Arguments for the Existence of God - [36]

“Rishi’s giving the keynote,” she said evenly.

Rishi Chandrakar had been her colleague at Princeton, where Lucinda had far outshone him. She doesn’t understand, she had told Cass repeatedly, why Pappa would ask Rishi rather than her to deliver the keynote.

“Rishi won’t deliver the keynote. He’ll deliver the anticlimax.” And Cass had meant it, too. He doesn’t know the first thing about Rishi Chandraker, but he knows Lucinda Mandelbaum.

“That’s sweet of you to say,” she said. “Cass, you’re sweet. Tell me what’s going on at your end. Anything new?”

“An old friend from way back when showed up in Cambridge, an incredible character. I’ll tell you all about it when you get home. It would take me too long to describe over the phone.”

“One of those crazies from those cults you study?”

“Cults like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?” He laughed.

“Yeah, like that.” She laughed back. “Did I ever tell you that when I first got to Harvard as an undergraduate I just couldn’t understand how there could be a Department of Religion? Why not departments of astrology and alchemy and chiromancy and necromancy? And then I found out Harvard actually had a Divinity School. How could they live with that and still claim Veritas as their motto?”

“I’ll never achieve your level of tough-mindedness,” he said. William James had distinguished between minds that are tough and tender. Their tone had returned to breezy.

“That’s because you’re the atheist with a soul. I don’t come so burdened.”

“But I’ve gazed into your soul, Lucinda.”

“That would make you the first to do that, including me. May I ask what you saw in there?”

“That would also take me too long to describe over the phone.”

The conversation, so sweet and silly, made him feel guilty for holding out on her about the Harvard offer, especially since the topic of Harvard had come up, and especially since he had spilled the beans earlier that evening over dinner with Roz, who had extravagantly congratulated him, leaning across the little candlelit table they were sharing, making sure to keep her hair from getting singed in the flames, and placing both her palms on his cheeks to draw him in for a smooch. Roz had never learned how to kiss halfway.

They had been sitting in a darkened romantic nook in the Spanish restaurant Dalí. The eccentric little restaurant was a post-kitsch composition of romantic grottoes, arched doorways, beaded curtains, golden tiles, embossed copper ceilings, mosaics, sunflowers, hanging hams, and other Spanish tchotchkes. It had been Roz’s favorite restaurant back when they’d been together, though they had rarely been able to afford it. She had certainly dressed up for the occasion. Cambridge was in deepfreeze, but she was showing a lot of skin in a slinky sleeveless black silk dress that had a red ruffle-flower at the right shoulder and another at the left hip. She was looking good, so good that Cass kept his eyes steadily away from her décolletage, out of loyalty to Lucinda. When he’d complimented her on the dress, remarking on its Dalí-esque appropriateness, she grinned in a way that made him wonder whether she’d known all along she was going to get him to bring her here.

He hadn’t really wanted to go out to dinner, since he has a lot of homework if he’s going to surprise Lucinda with his mastery of the Mandelbaum Equilibrium when she returns on Friday night, but Roz had wheedled him into it.

After some expert flirting with their waiter, Roz got down to business, asking Cass for names of people she could approach as potential donors to the Immortality Foundation.

“As a matter of fact, I do happen to know some people who might be interested. Do you know Luke Nanovitch?”

Cass had met Nanovitch at one of Sy Auerbach’s high-powered dinners, held at the Rialto in Cambridge, where Nanovitch had held forth to the assembled scientists and techies. Nanovitch, an inventor and futurist, has been proved right so many times when announcing what impossible thing he planned to invent next that he’s given up noticing when people don’t buy his prophecies. “Improvements to our genetic decoding will be downloaded via the Internet,” he had announced, his tone of voice the same as if he were predicting that the waiter would soon appear to take their orders. “We won’t even need a heart. The trick is to keep yourself alive for two decades more. It would be beyond ironic to die just short of the singularity that’s just around the corner.” Cass would have thought Nanovitch was mad if he hadn’t met him at an Auerbach-orchestrated dinner. He has faith in his agent’s shrewdness.

“Only by reputation, but I’d love to meet him!” Roz exclaimed now. “Nanovitch is one of my heroes!”

“Yes, I can see why. I heard him talking about your very own cause. Before that, the only thing I’d ever heard along these lines was the idea of flash-freezing corpses…”

“Cryogenics, the human Popsicle! Cryogenics is for crackpots!”

“Ah yes.”

“Don’t give me that smile, Cass. I’m not a crackpot! And if you don’t accept that on faith-though I’m a bit miffed that you don’t-then consider Nanovitch, one of the visionaries of our day. You’re not going to call Nanovitch a crackpot. More like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”