A Braver Thing

A Braver Thing

By Charles Sheffield

What did I do?

I think it is obvious.

Arthur`s work had always been marred by obscurity. Or rather to be fair to him, in his mind the important thing was that he understand an idea, not that he be required to explain to someone of lesser ability.

It took months of effort on my part to convert Arthur’s awkward notation and sketchy proofs to a form that could withstand rigorous scrutiny. At that point the work felt like my own; the re-creation of his half-stated thoughts was often indistinguishable from painful invention.

Finally I was ready to publish. Bu that time Arthur’s ledgers had been, true to my promise, long-since destroyed, for whatever else happened in the world I did not want Marion Shaw to see those notebooks or suspect anything of their contents.

I published. I could have submitted the work as the posthumous papers of Arthur Sandford Shaw… except that someone would certainly have asked to see the original material.

I published. I could have assigned joint authorship, as Shaw and Turnbull… except that Arthur had never presented a line on the subject, and the historians would have proved and probed to learn what his contribution had been.

A braver thing. Photo by Elena

I published – as Giles Turnbull. Three papers expounded what the world now knows as the Turnbull Concession Theory. Arthur Shaw was not mentioned. It is not easy to justify that, even to myself. I clung to one thought: Arthur had wanted his ideas suppressed, but that was a consequence of his own state of mind. It was surely better to give the ideas to the world, and risk their abuse in human hands. That, I said to myself, was the braver thing.

I published. And because there were already eight earlier papers of mine in the literature, exploring the same problem, acceptance of the new theory was quick, and my role in it was never in doubt.

On almost never. In the past four years, at scattered meetings around the world, I have seen in perhaps half a dozen glances the cloaked hint of a question. The world of physics holds a handful of living giants. They see each other clearly, towering above the rest of us, and when someone whom they have assessed as one of the pygmies shoots up to stand tall, not at their height but even well above them, there is at least a suspicion…

There is a braver thing…

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)