Читать книгу The Starship and the Canoe - Kenneth Brower - Страница 9

Freeman Dyson is a slender man of middle height. His hair is dark, still, and he moves youthfully. His head is long, but not oversized in any futuristic way. His nose is large. He dresses without eccentricity or absentmindedness, but he dresses a bit drably. He is not a man much concerned with appearances. He does have one mannerism of the sort that the world associates with its physicists—that tendency to retire from companionship, from the human plane and from sentences in progress, while he pursues some thought. He was born in England and spent his youth there, and he speaks still with a trace of his native accent.

Dyson’s eyes are his striking feature. They are dominated by the irises. The pupils seem too small, as if he were gazing always into a very bright light. His eyes are large, gray, and steady, and he holds them wide open. “Almost a mad stare—I have to say it,” one of his Orion colleagues has said.

Freeman’s son George is slender too. He stands about four inches taller than his father, and is a shade darker. In the summertime on the waterways of British Columbia, where George has lived from the time he was seventeen, the long days and the refracted sunlight tan him so darkly that he is taken for an Indian. He dresses entirely in wool, which stays warm when wet, and he is impatient with Northerners who don’t dress that way. His taste, or his necessity, runs to long woolen underwear, baggy oft-patched wool trousers, ragged wool sweaters, and wool watch caps. He often goes barefoot. His hair is moderately long and it hangs scraggly in the rain. He is in his early twenties, and his beard is still sparse. It’s a Northwest Indian beard—Nootka or Kwakiutl. “They have either no beards at all,” wrote Captain Cook, “which was most commonly the case, or a small thin one upon the point of the chin; which does not arise from any defect on that part, but from plucking it out more or less.” George achieves the effect naturally. He looks less like the son of a British physicist than the bastard of a French-Indian trapper.

But under the beard, the long hair, and the tan, George bears strong resemblance to his father. He has the same long face. His cranium, on the outside at least, is identical. He has the big nose. Both Freeman Dyson and George Dyson have broken their noses, but George’s break is more spectacular. His nose takes several turns before finishing. He is homelyhandsome. His features are strong, but they lack the nice symmetry and proportion that break young girls’ hearts.

His eyes are his extraordinary feature. They are so dominated by the irises that the pupils seem pinpricks. His eyes are large, green, and steady, and he holds them wide open.