conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Billy, Nobel, Twillig with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Ratner's Star'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.. Start with the sentence 'Ratner's Star
  The foreshadowing stain had moved across the floor and started up the wall behind Dyne's head and was now in fact within several inches of a large photograph just to the right of the thalamic panel'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Ratner's Star
  The foreshadowing stain had moved across the floor and started up the wall behind Dyne's head and was now in fact within several inches of a large photograph just to the right of the thalamic panel. Billy recognized the man in the picture. It was Henrik Endor, a celebrated mathematician and astrophysicist. He was bearded, in his sixties, and wore a star pentagram on a chain around his neck. Billy had met him once, briefly, at Rockefeller University, where Endor had described himself as the wizened child of Thales and Heraclitus. His breath had smelled of peanuts.
  A workman came in now and told Byron Dyne that the fire-safety system had developed a malfunction. Although there was no immediate danger, many of the walls and floors were filling up with "liquid preventative." The very thickness of the walls was a safeguard, keeping actual moisture from seeping through even if a silhouette effect was evident. As the workman's report neared an end, Mrs. Laudabur started waving a hand in his face.
  During the ensuing remarks Billy strolled through the area, noting that the consoles, sixteen of them, were arranged in such a way that seven were separated from the other nine by an L-shaped partition. This meant that the square of three was derived from the square of four by the presence of this border or carpenter's rule and that if the number of consoles reached twenty-five and if a new partition were erected, isolating nine consoles this time, the result would be the square of four deriving from the square of five, an odd number in every case (seven, nine, so on) determining the split relationship between succeeding square numbers. Never really seized by the need to calculate, he was more apt to be aware of pattern than of brute numeration. Seeing he was alone once more with the scientist-administrator, he made his way back to the chair. Dyad of great and small. In the city of the elect they had passed across the porticos and outer gardens, white-veiled men, initiates in numbers, Dorian dancers, led to cells equipped with slates and ordained to decode the symbol of the twelve-faced universe.
  They'd had to confront the terror of the irrational, this everlasting slit in the divinity of whole numbers. Subdivide the continuous motion of a point. No common measure this side of madness. Ratio of diagonal to side of square. Three segments of a line on Endor's five-rayed star. Nothing corresponds. Something eludes. Screech and claw of the inexpressible.
  Dyne's smile cut off further discussion on the subject. He coughed into the sleeve of his suit jacket. Billy kind of liked that. It was both regal and sloppy, the sort of thing you'd expect from a serenely detached crackpot aristocrat. The man scanned the area now, eventually centering his attention on some theoretical point in the middle distance.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: He turned his attention to Ratner once more. The lacquered face was unevenly puffy. Where teeth were missing, the inflamed sockets had bulged to the point of convexity, leaving a mouth divided between shaky teeth and burnt-out gummy nubs. Finally the old man's voice resembled a wind-up toy's, metallic and unreal, but Billy didn't know whether this was the result of his physical condition or the purifying action of the electronic talk chamber.
  Billy reported to the others: "Telescope in a dome in the backyard. Marriage to the man's daughter owning the house. Science pays off. He gazes between shifts."
  The metallic lilt of Ratner's voice, when again he spoke, seemed to possess an extra shading, a suggestion of querulous tremor.
  Ratner's toy voice hissed and crackled through the chambered slot. The laureates were silent, standing in size places. Pitkin sat nearby on a large stone, silent, one hand covering most of his face, the mink fedora well back on his head, legs crossed and white flesh showing between the top of his black socks and his hitched-up trousers. The doctor and nurse were silent, respectfully set back about ten yards from the biomembrane, one on each side. Sandow was sitting on the edge of the organ bench, silent. Somewhere beneath them the hidden stream moved over smooth rock, making a faint smacking sound. From the boy's viewpoint the decals on either side of the tank appeared to be lettered in reverse. He looked closely at the old gentleman, tiny inside his prayer shawl, face gleaming with polymerized sweat.
  Beneath the beret, Ratner's face sagged a bit. The lustrous muscles went slack and there was a suggestion of reinforced flesh about to melt.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The lustrous muscles went slack and there was a suggestion of reinforced flesh about to melt. The lacquered face was unevenly puffy. Where teeth were missing, the inflamed sockets had bulged to the point of convexity, leaving a mouth divided between shaky teeth and burnt-out gummy nubs. Finally the old man's voice resembled a wind-up toy's, metallic and unreal, but Billy didn't know whether this was the result of his physical condition or the purifying action of the electronic talk chamber.
  Billy reported to the others: "Telescope in a dome in the backyard. Marriage to the man's daughter owning the house. Science pays off. He gazes between shifts."
  The metallic lilt of Ratner's voice, when again he spoke, seemed to possess an extra shading, a suggestion of querulous tremor.
  Ratner's toy voice hissed and crackled through the chambered slot. The laureates were silent, standing in size places. Pitkin sat nearby on a large stone, silent, one hand covering most of his face, the mink fedora well back on his head, legs crossed and white flesh showing between the top of his black socks and his hitched-up trousers. The doctor and nurse were silent, respectfully set back about ten yards from the biomembrane, one on each side. Sandow was sitting on the edge of the organ bench, silent. Somewhere beneath them the hidden stream moved over smooth rock, making a faint smacking sound. From the boy's viewpoint the decals on either side of the tank appeared to be lettered in reverse. He looked closely at the old gentleman, tiny inside his prayer shawl, face gleaming with polymerized sweat.
  Beneath the beret, Ratner's face sagged a bit.He turned his attention to Ratner once more.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: He sat in the middle of the back seat, sweating incandescently, feeling as though his body were covered with pond scum. He lifted the briefcase onto his lap and felt around inside for the old glue bottle that contained his most extreme deliriant, a sudsy composite of lighter fluid, paint thinner, airplane glue, nail polish remover and several types of aerosol propellant. With some effort he removed the old-fashioned rubber cap (with brush attached). Then he held the sticky rim of the bottle right under his nose. He inhaled deeply several times, sitting primly in the geographic center of the back seat, his lids descending slowly behind the glasses.
  Softly nodding briefly into history pondered unopposed (by his own precedent) the mock battles that were fought in old Egypt and Mesopotamia to accompany the conflict suggested by various celestial events. In this way the crisis of time (of light that fades and season that ends) was made specific and personal, detached from abstraction. People translated the event into the sweating arcs of their own bodies, perhaps trying to act beyond their fear, inventing games to fill this crevice in the heavens. The briefcase was between his feet. He tapped his fingers on his knees. Fumes, nausea, salty moisture. Deciding to address the driver he opened his mouth slowly, half expecting to see a bubble emerge.
  The wind was fairly strong. He handed his briefcase through the open window to the man at the passenger's end of the front seat. He stood for a moment a few feet from the car. He heard it start, turn and move off. Then he walked across the grass, still some light, and realized he was lurching even more than usual. He kept his head down. When he got to the edge of the hole he paused, syllogist of dire night.
  The hole was roughly rectangular in shape. One side was less steep than the others and he chose this surface for his descent. He entered the hole more or less sitting down, his feet before him performing braking maneuvers, his hands employed to balance. At the bottom he stood up and brushed off the seat of his pants. He took off the dark glasses, put them in the breast pocket of his suit coat and got down on hands and knees. The wind seemed to be subsiding. It was still light, still light. Some forewarning mechanism made him begin to crawl, knowing, everywhere, feeling it, a sense of violated space, the air itself infused with this infrared surprise. Experimentally he made some sounds. He crawled the full length of the hole and entered the hole's hole. The tunnel began to slant downward as he moved into extreme darkness. The hole was low and narrow. He began to crawl faster. The rate of inclination gradually increased. His fingers scratched at the hard dirt. He made more sounds. There were sectors so narrow he had to chop and claw at the dirt walls to give himself room to move forward. The darkness was total now. His hand touched something cold and hard and he picked it up, a length of barely pliable metallic wire, twisted at one end, curved sharply at the other as if to fit over a hook or rod. He used it to clear the dirt in narrow areas, crawling faster now, the slope angling ever down. His hands felt scraps of clothlike material, thin strands of it, littered here and there along the floor of the hole. He moved forward into a large and slyly constructed object, human (it would seem) and covered (his hand determined) by whole cities of vermiculate life. Softly did not pause further to investigate for signs of pulse, heartbeat, so on. He crawled directly over the human object and straight into a solid mass of dirt. Again he did not pause. Using both hands he gouged out chunks of heavy earth. He made noises and sounds. His fingers scratched and clawed to clear a passage. He used the curved metallic object on areas where the dirt was firmest. The angle of descent was very severe. He continued to dig the hole's hole. The sounds he uttered became by degrees more rudimentary and crude. He crawled, knowing, he scratched at dirt, he clawed the hard earth, everywhere, feeling it, a sense of interlocking opposites, the paradox, the comedy, the fool's rule of total radiance.
  On the surface another figure moved, this one on a white tricycle, heading the same way the Cadillac had come, madly pedaling, a boy a bit too large for his chosen means of transportation, knees bowed outward, elbows high and wide, head drawn into torso, his thumb on the small bell attached to the handlebar. He wore a jacket and tie. A measured length of darkness passed over him as he neared the hole and then he found himself pedaling in a white area between the shadow bands that precede total solar eclipse. This interval of whiteness, suggestive of the space between perfectly ruled lines, prompted him to ring the metal bell. It made no sound, or none that he could hear, laughing as he was, alternately blank and shadow-banded, producing as he was this noise resembling laughter, expressing vocally what appeared to be a compelling emotion, crying out as he was, gasping into the stillness, emitting as he was this series of involuntary shrieks, particles bouncing in the air around him, the reproductive dust of existence.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: He lifted the briefcase onto his lap and felt around inside for the old glue bottle that contained his most extreme deliriant, a sudsy composite of lighter fluid, paint thinner, airplane glue, nail polish remover and several types of aerosol propellant. With some effort he removed the old-fashioned rubber cap (with brush attached). Then he held the sticky rim of the bottle right under his nose. He inhaled deeply several times, sitting primly in the geographic center of the back seat, his lids descending slowly behind the glasses.
  Softly nodding briefly into history pondered unopposed (by his own precedent) the mock battles that were fought in old Egypt and Mesopotamia to accompany the conflict suggested by various celestial events. In this way the crisis of time (of light that fades and season that ends) was made specific and personal, detached from abstraction. People translated the event into the sweating arcs of their own bodies, perhaps trying to act beyond their fear, inventing games to fill this crevice in the heavens. The briefcase was between his feet. He tapped his fingers on his knees. Fumes, nausea, salty moisture. Deciding to address the driver he opened his mouth slowly, half expecting to see a bubble emerge.
  The wind was fairly strong. He handed his briefcase through the open window to the man at the passenger's end of the front seat. He stood for a moment a few feet from the car. He heard it start, turn and move off. Then he walked across the grass, still some light, and realized he was lurching even more than usual. He kept his head down. When he got to the edge of the hole he paused, syllogist of dire night.
  The hole was roughly rectangular in shape. One side was less steep than the others and he chose this surface for his descent. He entered the hole more or less sitting down, his feet before him performing braking maneuvers, his hands employed to balance. At the bottom he stood up and brushed off the seat of his pants. He took off the dark glasses, put them in the breast pocket of his suit coat and got down on hands and knees. The wind seemed to be subsiding. It was still light, still light. Some forewarning mechanism made him begin to crawl, knowing, everywhere, feeling it, a sense of violated space, the air itself infused with this infrared surprise. Experimentally he made some sounds. He crawled the full length of the hole and entered the hole's hole. The tunnel began to slant downward as he moved into extreme darkness. The hole was low and narrow. He began to crawl faster. The rate of inclination gradually increased. His fingers scratched at the hard dirt. He made more sounds. There were sectors so narrow he had to chop and claw at the dirt walls to give himself room to move forward. The darkness was total now. His hand touched something cold and hard and he picked it up, a length of barely pliable metallic wire, twisted at one end, curved sharply at the other as if to fit over a hook or rod. He used it to clear the dirt in narrow areas, crawling faster now, the slope angling ever down. His hands felt scraps of clothlike material, thin strands of it, littered here and there along the floor of the hole. He moved forward into a large and slyly constructed object, human (it would seem) and covered (his hand determined) by whole cities of vermiculate life. Softly did not pause further to investigate for signs of pulse, heartbeat, so on. He crawled directly over the human object and straight into a solid mass of dirt. Again he did not pause. Using both hands he gouged out chunks of heavy earth. He made noises and sounds. His fingers scratched and clawed to clear a passage. He used the curved metallic object on areas where the dirt was firmest. The angle of descent was very severe. He continued to dig the hole's hole. The sounds he uttered became by degrees more rudimentary and crude. He crawled, knowing, he scratched at dirt, he clawed the hard earth, everywhere, feeling it, a sense of interlocking opposites, the paradox, the comedy, the fool's rule of total radiance.
  On the surface another figure moved, this one on a white tricycle, heading the same way the Cadillac had come, madly pedaling, a boy a bit too large for his chosen means of transportation, knees bowed outward, elbows high and wide, head drawn into torso, his thumb on the small bell attached to the handlebar. He wore a jacket and tie. A measured length of darkness passed over him as he neared the hole and then he found himself pedaling in a white area between the shadow bands that precede total solar eclipse. This interval of whiteness, suggestive of the space between perfectly ruled lines, prompted him to ring the metal bell. It made no sound, or none that he could hear, laughing as he was, alternately blank and shadow-banded, producing as he was this noise resembling laughter, expressing vocally what appeared to be a compelling emotion, crying out as he was, gasping into the stillness, emitting as he was this series of involuntary shrieks, particles bouncing in the air around him, the reproductive dust of existence.