(4 of 5)
By culling the Journal of Irreproducible Results and the Journal of Jocular Physics as well as more sober publications, R.L. Weber, an associate professor of physics at Penn State, has turned up more than 100 examples of the scientific mind at play. Against considerable odds, the result is a collection of short pieces that are funny and reassuring. If the future cloners and behavioral conditioners of society have a sense of humor, all may yet be well.
One of the best is the classic Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown, in which a structural engineer confronts "the problem of designing a dress which appears as if it would fall at any moment and yet actually stays up with some small factor of safety." The solution lies in understanding the principle of the cantilever beam.
Equally good as satires of scientific logic are an essay that postulates the existence of the Infinite Zipper and another that proves heaven is actually hotter than hell. The reasoning goes like this: heaven, which the Bible says receives 49 times as much radiation from the sun as the earth does (Isaiah 30:26), would therefore have a temperature of 525° C. Hell, where the main topographical feature is a lake of molten brimstone (Revelation 21:8), could have a temperature of no more, no less, than 444.6° C. Above that temperature, the brimstone would vaporize; much below it, the lake would harden.
And so forth.
STRINGER by WARD JUST 199 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $5.95.
A certain vagueness about the title character raises the suspicion that this tough novel about an American guerrilla-warfare expert who cracks up in an Asian jungle may be a parable of the American Viet Nam disaster. Indeed, it might be entitled The Gray Badge of Pragmatism.
The hero, a 35-year-old civilian technician named Stringer, is attached by the terms of a lucrative contract to a special Army unit. His task: to plant sensing devices near an enemy supply trail so that "smart" bombs can home in on military convoys. He knows how to survive in the bush and is not afraid of spiders or the Viet Cong. But his motivation is uncertain, and this earns him the contempt of his partner, a hard-case Regular Army major named Price.
Price senses that Stringer is a member of nothing. He has no use for military form; the possibilities of the civilian world seem to him narrowing spirals of delusion. Although he appears humane and sensitive, his compass swings powerfully toward chaos and war.
Despite danger and disease, Stringer carries on, planting sensors and calling in air strikes. Sick from rotten water, he hallucinates a slippery dialogue with an imaginary captor. The jungle becomes his world and his home. When Army helicopters come to rescue him, he shoots them down.
Novelist Just finesses most of the moral and artistic questions that could be asked about his book and his character's situation. The reader will find himself wavering between conflicting assessments: the story is really a disturbing piece of surrealism or it is a neat con job. The compromise view—that the book is a bit of both—leaves Ward Just (author of The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert, an excellent collection of several stories published last year) as one of several promising American writers now creeping up on the big novel.