Timescape

CHAPTER ELEVEN

PETERSON AWOKE AND LOOKED OUT OF THE WINDOW. The pilot had looped around to come in to San Diego from the ocean side. From this height most of the coastline north to Los Angeles was visible. That city was cloaked in its permanent haze; otherwise the day was clear and bright. The sun sparked flashes of brilliance from the windows of high-rise office blocks. Peterson stared vacantly at the sea. Tiny puckered lines of waves crawled imperceptibly toward the shore. Here and there, as the plane swung lower, he could see curves of white froth against the blue, vastly different from the ocean he had flown over the day before.

He had taken a commercial flight. From the air, the diatom bloom on the Atlantic had been horribly visible. It now extended over a hundred-kilometer diameter. Bloom was a good word for it, he thought wryly. It had looked like some giant flower, a scarlet camellia blossoming far off the shores of Brazil. His fellow passengers had been excited by the vision, stampeding from window to window to get a better view, asking agitated questions. Interesting, he observed, how red, the color of blood, spelled danger to the human mind. It had been eerie to look down and see that still, wounded ocean, the fringe of pink surf.

His mind had distanced itself from the reality below, turning it into a surrealistic work of art. Add purple jaguars and yellow trees: a Jesse Allen. And orange fishes in the air above…

How did that Bottomley poem go? The second stanza—something about forcing the birds to wing too high—where your unnatural vapors creep; Surely the living rocks shall die when birds no rightful distance keep. Nineteenth-century doggerel. How one clutched at the shreds of civilization.

There had been rioting in Rio. Standard political stuff, pop Marxism and local gripes touched off by the bloom. A waiting helicopter had whisked him from the airport to a secret rendezvous on a large yacht, anchored offshore north of the city. The Brazilian President was there, with his Cabinet. McKerrow from Washington, and Jean-Claude Rollet, a colleague of Peterson’s on the Council. They had conferred from 10 a.m. until late afternoon, having lunch brought in to them. Measures would be taken to contain the bloom, if possible. The crucial thing was to reverse the process; experiments were being conducted in the Indian Ocean and in control tanks in Southern California. Some emergency supplies were voted to Brazil, to compensate for the disruption in fishing. The Brazilian President was to play down the significance of this, avoid wholesale panic. Fingers-in-the-dike, fragile buttresses against the weight of the sickened sea around them, and so on. When they disbanded, Rollet had gone to report directly to the Council.

Peterson had had to step lively to avoid getting loaded up with errand-running, interference-blocking, and other jobs. Lubricating a crisis like this one took a lot of skillful footwork. There were the individual nations to soothe, England’s own interests to look out for (though that was not his prime official task), and of course the ever-present snout of the media pig. Peterson had argued successfully that someone needed to give an official beady eye to the California experiments. One had not only to do the right thing, one must above all be seen doing it. This got him the time he needed. His true purpose was a little experiment he’d thought of himself.

Straightaway after touchdown canned music came on and chaps began hauling out their carry-ons for the rush. Peterson found this the worst part of commercial travel and wished again he had pressed Sir Martin for authority to have his own executive jet on this trip. They were expensive, wasteful, etc. etc., but a bloody sight better than going in a cattle-car with wings. The standard argument, that private transport let one rest and thus saved the valuable executive’s energies, hadn’t held up well in the era of dwindling budgets.

He left the plane before anyone else, through the forward door, as per plan. There was a gratifyingly large security guard, decked out in leather boots and helmet. By now he was used to the openly worn automatic pistols.

His limo contained a protocol officer who babbled on to no consequence, but Peterson turned him off early on and enjoyed the ride. The security car behind stayed quite close, he noted. There seemed no sign of the recent “unpleasantness.” A few burned-out blocks of buildings, to be sure, and a freeway underpass on Route 405 pocked by heavy-caliber fire, but no air of lingering tension. The streets were fairly clear and the freeway was virtually deserted. Since the Mexican fields had petered out far ahead of notoriously optimistic schedules, California had ceased to be an automobile-worshiping paradise. That, plus the political pressure from the Mexicans to make good the highflown promises of economic uplift, had mixed in with the rest of the political brew here and led to the “unrest.”

The usual ceremonies sopped up minimal time. The Scripps Institute of Oceanography had a weathered but solid look to it, blue tiles and salty smell and all that. The staff were by now used to dignitaries trotting through. The TV johnnies got their footage—only it wasn’t called that anymore, Peterson, reminded himself, the mysterious term “dexers” having materialized in its place—and were duly ushered away. Peterson smiled, shook hands, made bland small talk. The package Markham had asked for from Caltech appeared and Peterson tucked it into his carrying case. Markham had requested this material, said it related to the tachyon business, and Peterson had agreed to use his good offices to extract it from the Americans. The work wasn’t publishable yet, a familiar ruse to avoid giving away anything, but a bit of footwork had got round that one.

The morning went by as planned. A general survey by an oceanographer, slides and viewgraphs before an audience of twenty. Then a reprise, more frank and far more pessimistic, with an audience of five. Then Alex Kiefer, head of the thing, in private.

“Don’t you want to take your coat off? It’s pretty warm today. Great day, in fact.” Kiefer spoke fast, almost nervously, and blinked as he spoke. Free of the mob now, Kiefer seemed to have an excess of energy. He walked quickly, bouncing forward on his toes, and looked around him constantly, jerkily saluting the few people they passed. He ushered Peterson into his office.

“Come in, come in,” he said, rubbing his hands. “Take a seat. Let me take your jacket. No? Yes, beautiful view, isn’t it? Beautiful.”

This latter was in response to a comment Peterson had not in fact made, although he had automatically crossed to the large corner windows, drawn by the shimmering expanse of the Pacific below. “Yes,” he said now, making the expected remark. “It’s a magnificent view. Doesn’t it distract you?”

The wide sandy beach stretched toward La Jolla and then curved out, broken up by rocks and coves, to a promontory surrounded by paradise palms. Out on the ocean, lines of surfers in wet suits sat bobbing patiently on their boards like large black sea birds.

Kiefer laughed. “If I find I can’t concentrate, I just put on a wet suit and go out and swim. Clears the mind. I try to swim every day. Matter of fact, hardly need a wet suit these days. Water’s already pretty warm. Those youngsters out there think it’s cold.” He indicated the surfers, most of whom were now on their knees, paddling before a good-sized wave. “In the old days it used to get real cold. Before they put those multi-gigawatt nuclear plants at San Onofre, y’know. Well, I’m sure you know. That kind of thing is your business, isn’t it? Anyway, it’s raised the water temperature slightly, just along this section of the coast. Interesting. So far it seems to have stimulated aquatic life. We’re watching it carefully here, of course. In fact, it’s one of our chief studies. If it gets higher, it could alter some cycles, but as far as we know, it’s peaked. There’s been no increase for several years now.”

Kiefer’s movements and speech became less jerky as he began to talk about his work. Peterson guessed him to be in his late forties. There were lines about his eyes and his wiry black hair was gray at the sides but he looked fit and lean. He had the look of an ascetic, but his office belied it. Peterson had already noted, with that mixture of envy and contempt he often felt in America, Kiefer’s perks: deep pile of the fitted olive-green carpet, sleek expanse of rosewood desk top, moist hanging ferns and spider plants, Japanese prints on the walls, glossy magazines on the tile-topped coffee table, and of course the vast tinted windows with their Pacific view. He had a momentary vision or Renfrew’s cluttered cubbyhole in Cambridge. Apart from the view, however, Kiefer showed no pride in or even awareness of his surroundings. They sat down, not at his desk, but in comfortable chairs by the coffee table. Peterson calculated that quite enough had been done along the lines of intimidate-the-visitor and decided a gesture of indifference was needed.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked, producing a cigar and gold lighter.

“Oh… I… well, sure.” Kiefer appeared momentarily flustered. “Yes, yes, of course.” He got up and slid the large window partly open, then crossed to his desk and spoke into the intercom. “Carrie? Would you bring in an ashtray, please?”

“I’m sorry,” Peterson said. “I seem to have violated a taboo. I thought smoking was allowed in private offices.”

“Oh, it is, it is,” Kiefer assured him. “It’s quite all right. It’s just that I’m a nonsmoker myself and pretty much try to discourage others.” He flashed Peterson a sudden crooked and disarming grin. “Hopefully, you’ll see the light soon. I’d appreciate it if you’d stay rather downwind of me, so to speak.” Peterson judged the “rather” was the usual American attempt at speaking English-English, the effect in any case spoiled by the grammatical error in the sentence before it.

The door opened and Kiefer’s secretary came in with an ashtray which she set before Peterson. Peterson thanked her, abstractedly tabulating her physical characteristics and giving her a good 8 out of 10. He realized with relish that only his status as a member of the Council had overridden Kiefer’s ban on smoking in his office.

Kiefer perched on the edge of the chair facing him. “So… tell me how you found the situation in South America.” He rubbed his hands together eagerly.

Petersen exhaled luxuriously. “It’s bad. Not desperate yet but very serious. Brazil has become more dependent on fishing lately thanks to their shortsighted slash-and-burn policy of a decade or two ago—and of course this bloom seriously affects fishing.”

Kiefer leaned forward even more, as eager for details as any gossiping housewife, and at this point Peterson put himself on automatic. He revealed what he had to and extracted from Kiefer a few technical points worth remembering. He knew more biology than physics, so he did a better job than with Renfrew and Markham. Kiefer went into their funding situation—bleak, of course; one never heard any other tune—and Peterson guided him back onto useful stuff.

“We believe the whole food chain may be threatened,” Kiefer said. “The phytoplankton are succumbing to the chlorinated hydrocarbons—the kind used in fertilizer.” Kiefer leafed through the reports. “Manodrin, specifically.”

“Manodrin?”

“Manodrin is a chlorinated hydrocarbon used in insecticides. It has opened a new life niche among the microscopic algae. A new variety of diatom has evolved. It uses an enzyme which breaks down manodrin. The diatom silica also excrete a breakdown product which interrupts transmission of nerve impulses in animals. Dendritic connections fail. But they must have gone into all this at the conference.”

“It was mostly at the political level, what steps to be taken to meet the immediate crisis and so on.”

“What is going to be done about it?”

“They’re going to try to shift resources from the Indian Ocean experiments to contain the bloom, but I don’t know if it’ll work. They haven’t completed their tests yet.”

Kiefer drummed his fingers on the ceramic tiles. He asked abruptly, “Did you see the bloom yourself?”

“I flew over it,” Peterson answered. “It’s ugly as sin. The color terrifies the fishing villages.”

“I think I’ll go down there myself,” Kiefer muttered, more to himself than to Peterson. He got up and began to pace the room. “Still, y’know, I keep feeling there’s something else…”

“Yes?”

“One of my lab types thinks there’s something special going on here, a way the process can kinda alter itself.” Kiefer waved a hand in dismissal. “All hypothetical, though. I’ll keep you informed if any of it pans out.”

“Pans out?”

“Works, I mean.”

“Oh. Do.”

Peterson got away from Scripps later than he’d planned. He accepted an invitation to dinner at Kiefer’s to keep things going on the good-fellow front, always a wise idea. It was harder for a sod to cross you when he’s drunk some and told a joke and devoured a casserole in your company, however boring the conversation had been.

Peterson’s limo and tag-along security detail took him into La Jolla center for the appointment at San Diego First Federal Savings. It was a bulky squarish building, set dead among a brace of tedious stores of the shoppe variety. He thought of getting something as a traveler-home-from-the-wars gift, something he’d done more often when younger, but dismissed the idea after three seconds of deliberation. The shops were of the semi-infinite markup species and despite the rickety dollar, the pound was worse. All that would be quite to the side if the shops had been interesting, but instead they sported knickknacks and ornate lamps and gaudy ashtrays. He grimaced and went into the bank.

The bank manager met them at the door, primed by the sight of the security force. Yes, he had been advised of Mr. Peterson’s arrival, yes, they had searched the bank records. Once inside the manager’s office Peterson asked brusquely, “Well, then?”

“Ah, sir, it was a surprise to us, let me tell you,” the thin man said seriously. “A safety deposit box with the fees arranged for decades ago. Not your typical situation.”

“Quite so.”

“I… I was told you would not have the key?” The man obviously hoped Peterson would have it, though, and save him a lot of explaining to his superiors afterward.

“Right, I don’t. But didn’t you find the box was registered in my name?”

“Yes, we did. I don’t understand…”

“Let us simply say this is a matter of, ah, national security.”

“Still, without a key, the owner—”

“National security. Time is important here. I believe you take my meaning?” Peterson gave the man his best distant smile.

“Well, the undersecretary did explain part of it on the phone, and I have checked with my immediate superior, but—”

“Well, then, I’m happy to see things have worked out so quickly. I congratulate you on your speed. Always good to see an efficient operation.”

“Well, we do—”

“I would like to have a quick look at it now,” Peterson said with a certain undertone of firmness.

“Well, ah, this, this way…”

They went through a pointless ritual of signing in and stamping the precise time and passing through the buzzing gate. The huge steel doors were opened to reveal a gleaming wall array of boxes. The manager nervously fished appropriate keys from his vest pocket. He found the right box and slid it out. There was a moment’s hesitation before he surrendered it. “Thanks, yes,” Peterson murmured politely, and went directly to the small room nearby for privacy.

He’d had this idea on his own and rather liked it. If what Markham said was right, it was possible to reach someone in the past and change the present. But precisely how this action affected the present wasn’t clear. Since the past viewed now might well be the one Renfrew had created, how could they tell it from some other past that never happened, but might have? This whole way of looking at it was a mistake, Markham said, since once you passed a tachyon beam between two times they were forever linked, a closed loop. But to Peterson it seemed essential to know if you had in fact got through. In Markham’s idealized experiments, with flipping light switches and toggles moving back and forth between pegs and all, the whole question was confused. So Peterson had proposed a check, of sorts. True enough, you had to send back the preliminary ocean data and so on. But you could also ask the past to set aside some kind of road marker. One clear sign that the signals had been received—that would be enough to convince Peterson that these ideas weren’t drivel. So two days before leaving London he’d called Renfrew arid given him a specific message to send. Markham had a list of the experimental groups who could conceivably receive a tachyon message on their nuclear magnetic resonance devices. A message was addressed to each site—New York, La Jolla, Moscow. Each was requested to establish a clearly labeled safety deposit box in Peterson’s name with a note inside. That should be enough.

Peterson couldn’t reach Moscow without explaining to Sir Martin why he wanted to go. New York was out of the question, temporarily, because of the terrorists. That left La Jolla.

Peterson felt his pulse quicken as the catch on the safety deposit box came free with a click. When the lid of the box tilted back he saw only a sheet of yellow paper folded in thirds. He picked it up and carefully flattened the creases. It crackled with age.

MESSAGE RECEIVED LA JOLLA

That was all. It was quite enough. Instantly Peterson felt two conflicting emotions: elation, and a sudden disappointment that he had not asked for more. Who had written the note? What else did they receive? He realized ruefully that he had assumed the sod getting the signal would obey the instruction and then go on and tell how he got it, what he thought it meant, or at least who he buggering well was.

But no, no, he thought, sitting back. This was enough. This proved the whole colossal business was right. Incredible, but right. The implications beyond that were unclear, granted—but this much was certain.

And as well, he thought with a touch of pride, he had done it all himself. He wondered for a moment if this was what it was like to be a scientist, to make a discovery, to see the world unlocked if only for an instant.

Then the bank manager knocked hesitantly on the door, the mood was lost, and Peterson pocketed the sheet of yellow.

He stayed at the Valencia Hotel in a suite overlooking the cove. The park below was part gnawed away by the encroaching surf, as evidenced by the sudden termination of some walkways. All along the coast the waves had undercut the conglomerate soil. Shelves stuck out above the surf, ready to topple. No one seemed to notice.

He told his security men and limo to clear off for the night. They made him conspicuous and he had been under the limelight quite enough for one day. His mind was churning with the success at the bank. He dissipated some of the energy with thirty laps in the hotel pool, and then with unsuccessful forays into

the shops near the hotel. The clothing stores interested him most, but they were the sort which could not simply display their wares and stand aside, but set them in scenes of English manor houses or French chateaux. There was still money here, though most of it seemed misdirected. The people were bright and clean and glossy. At least being prosperous set one apart in England; here it guaranteed nothing, not even taste.

The sidewalks thronged with old people, some quite rude if you didn’t step aside for them. The younger men, though, were bright and athletic. The women interested him more, crisply fashionable, immaculately groomed. There was a certain blandness to them, though, an indefinable stamp of prosperous neutrality. Part of him envied this life. He knew that these people striding so confidently along Girard were hemmed in by as many restrictions as the English—Southern California was a mass of limits on immigration, buying houses, water use, changing jobs, automobiles, everything—but they looked free. There was still not much of the worldweariness here which Europeans often equated with maturity. He had always missed a certain complexity among the women, as well. They seemed interchangeable, their faces carefully smooth and open. Sex with them was healthy, competent, and matter-of-fact. If one propositioned them, they were never surprised or shocked. Their no meant no and their yes meant yes. He missed the challenge of the no that meant maybe, the elegant game of seduction. These Americans didn’t play games; they were energetic and skillful but never devious or secret or subtle. They preferred direct questions, gave direct answers. They liked to be on top.

At this point in his musings, he stopped before a wine store, and decided to see if he could get a few cases of good California wine flown back to England. One never knew when the chance would come again.

He was waiting in the bar for Kiefer when the thought struck him. What if he’d simply sent a letter to Renfrew, with the message inside? Given the post these days, it might not have even reached him by now, never mind being acted upon. In that case, after he’d got the yellow paper today, he could’ve rung up Renfrew and ordered him not to send the message. What would Markham make of that?

He finished his gin and then remembered the business about the loops. Yes, the scheme he’d just devised would have thrown everything into an indeterminate state. That was the answer. But what kind of answer was that?

“Damn streets,” Kiefer complained. “Getting like a slum.” He wrenched the steering wheel around a sharp curve. Tires howled.

For Peterson this change of topic was a decided improvement. Kiefer had been reciting the virtues and benefits of eating fresh vegetables brought in at something approximating the speed of light from “the valley,” a cornucopia needing no further name.

To encourage this new line of discussion Peterson ventured mildly, “It all looks very prosperous to me.”

“Yes, well, of course, you don’t see it if you keep to the avenues. But it’s getting harder to maintain standards. Look around you here, for instance. Notice anything?”

They were high in the hills now, on winding narrow roads that afforded glimpses of the ocean between Spanish ranches and miniature French chateaux.

“See how they’re walled in? When we first came here, oh, almost twenty years ago now, they were all open. Great views from every house. Now you can’t even call on your neighbor without standing out in the street pushing buttons and talking into an intercom. And frap, you should see the antiburglar networks! Electronics worth a hundred German shepherds. Backup batteries for brownouts, too.”

“The crime rate is bad, then?” Peterson asked.

“Terrible. Illegal aliens, too many people, not enough jobs. Everybody feels he has a right to a life of luxury—or at least comfort—so there’s a lot of frustration and resentment when the dream craps out.”

Peterson began to replan his schedule. He would leave time to find the best electronic security system he could. Stupid of him, not to think of it before. That sort of thing was precisely where the Americans excelled. He would have use for a good system, adaptable and rugged. If possible, he would carry it back with him on the plane. Again he wished for a private jet.

“The town is getting carved up into sealed-off enclaves,” Kiefer went on. “Oldsters, mostly.”

Peterson nodded as Kiefer cited statistics for California, which was second only to Florida in percentage of old people. Since the foldup of the Social Security system, the Senior Movement lobby had been pressuring even harder for special privileges, tax breaks, and extra favors. Peterson was sure he knew more of the demographics than Kiefer; the Council had got a worldwide picture on them two years ago, including some confidential projections. Attaining the zero-population-growth birth rate had left the US and Europe with a bulge in the population curve, now hitting retirement age. They expected hefty monthly checks, which had to come from the reduced ranks of younger people through taxes. It led to an “entitlement syndrome.” The old felt they’d paid heavy taxes all along and then been put on the shelf before they could earn the immense salaries now going to junior executives. They were “entitled,” the Senior Movement argued, and society had damned well better cough up. The oldsters voted more often and with a sharper eye for self-interest. They had power. In California a gray head had become a symbol of political activism.

“—they don’t come out for weeks, with the spiffy televideo systems they buy. Saves ’em shopping or going to the bank or seeing anybody under sixty. They just do it all electronically. Kills the town, though. The oldest movie theater in La Jolla, the Unicorn, closed last month. Damned shame.”

Peterson nodded with a show of interest, still thinking about rearranging his schedule. The car swung into a steep driveway as the gate opened before it. They climbed up towards a long white house. Bastard Spanish, Peterson classified silently. Expensive, but without style. Kiefer parked in the carport and Peterson noticed bicycles and a wagon. Christ, children. If he had to share the dinner table with a crew of American brats—

It looked as though his fears were going to be realized when they were met at the door by two young boys jumping at Kiefer and both talking at once. Kiefer managed to quiet them down long enough to introduce them to Peterson. Both children then trained their attention on him. The older boy dispensed with preliminaries and asked directly, “Are you a scientist like my dad?” The younger fixed him with an unwinking stare, shifting from foot to foot in an irritating way. Of the two, he was potentially the noisier and more troublesome, Peterson decided. He knew the older boy’s type—earnest, talkative, opinionated, and nearly uncrushable.

“Not exactly,” he began, but was interrupted.

“My dad is studying diatoms in the ocean,” the boy said, dismissing Peterson. “It’s very important. I’m going to be a scientist too when I grow up but maybe an astronomer and David’s going to be an astronaut but he’s only five so he doesn’t really know. Would you like to see the model of the solar system I made for our science project?”

“No, no, Bill,” Kiefer answered hastily. “I know it’s very nice but Mr, Peterson doesn’t want to be bothered now. We’re going to have a drink and talk about grown-up things.” He led the way to the living room, followed by Peterson and the two boys. Kiefer would be the sort of parent who called adults “grown-ups,” Peterson thought drily.

“I can talk about grown-up things too,” Bill said indignantly.

“Yes, yes, of course you can. What I meant was, we’re going to talk about things that wouldn’t interest you. What’ll you have to drink? Can I offer you a whisky and soda, wine, tequila… ?”

“How do you know they wouldn’t interest me, lots of things interest me,” the child persisted, before Peterson could answer. The situation was saved by a light, firm voice calling from another room. “Boys! Come here at once, please!” The two vanished without argument. Peterson stored for future use the verbal backhand he had been about to deal the older boy.

“I see you have some Pernod there. Could I have a Pernod and tequila, with a dash of lemon, if you please?”

“Jeez, what a mixture. Is it good? I don’t often drink hard liquor myself. Liver, y’know. Sit down, I’m pretty sure we have some lemon juice. My wife will know. Does that drink have a name or did you invent it?” Kiefer was acting erratically again.

“I believe it’s called a macho,” Peterson said wryly.

He looked around the room. It was simple and elegant, totally white except for a few Oriental pieces. An exquisite screen stood against the far wall. To the right of the fireplace was a Japanese scroll, and a flower arrangement sat in an alcove. Opposite the fireplace, uncurtained picture windows looked over roofs and treetops towards the Pacific. The ocean was a black blanket beside lights that glittered everywhere else, up and down the coast, as far as Peterson could see. He chose a seat on a low white sofa, sitting sideways at the end of it so he could see both the room and the view. In spite of little heaps of muddled papers here and there, obviously Kiefer’s, the room exuded a certain serenity.

“I hope this is right. Equal amounts of Pernod and tequila, is that it? I’ll go and check on the lemon juice. Oh, here’s my wife now.”

Peterson turned toward the doorway, looked and looked again. He rose slowly to his feet. Kiefer’s wife stunned him. Japanese, young, slender, and very beautiful. Not taking his eyes from her, he tried to sort out his first disoriented impressions. In her late twenties, he decided, which explained Kiefer’s having such young children. A second marriage for him, no doubt. She was dressed in white Levis and a high-necked white top of some slithery material. Nothing under it, he noted with approval. Her hair fell smooth and straight, almost to her waist, so black it seemed to have a blue sheen. But it was her eyes that riveted his attention. Seeing her all in white in this dimly lit white room, he had the eerie sensation that her head was floating by itself. She had paused in the doorway, not deliberately for effect, Peterson thought, but her appearance was dramatic. He felt unable to move until she did. Kiefer darted nervously forward.

“Mitsuoko, my dear, come in, come in. I want you to meet our guest, Ian Peterson. Peterson, this is my wife, Mitsuoko.” He looked eagerly from one to the other like a child bringing home a prize.

She came forward into the room, moving with a fluid grace that delighted Peterson. She held out her hand to him: cool and smooth.

“Hello,” she said. For once Peterson felt he could use the standard American greeting “Glad to meet you” with sincerity.

He murmured “How do you do?” narrowing his eyes slightly to communicate what his formal greeting lacked. The merest hint of a smile lifted the corners of her lips at his unspoken message. Their gazes held fractionally longer than convention dictated. Then she withdrew her hand from his and went over to sit on the sofa.

“Do we have any lemon juice, honey?” Kiefer was rubbing Iiis hands together again in his awkward way. “And what about you? Will you have something to drink?”

“Yes to both questions,” she answered. “There’s some lemon juice in the fridge and I’ll have a little white wine.” She turned to Peterson with a smile. “I can’t drink much at all. It goes straight to my head.”

Kiefer left the room in search of lemon juice.

“How are things in England, Mr. Peterson?” she asked, tilling her head back slightly. “It sounds grim in the news here.”

“It is bad, although a lot of people don’t yet realize how bad,” he replied. “Do you know England?”

“I was there for a year a while back. I’m very fond of England.”

“Oh? Were you working there?”

“I was on a postdoc at Imperial College in London. I’m a mathematician. I teach at UCSD now.” She was smiling as she watched him, expecting a reaction of surprise. Peterson did not show it. “I can see you expected something like a philosophy degree.”

“Oh, no, nothing so conventional,” he said smoothly, smiling back at her. He thought of philosophers as people who spent great swaths of time on questions of no more true depth than “If there is no God, then who pulls up the next Kleenex?” He was about to form this into an epigram when Kiefer came back into the room with a glass of wine and a small bottle.

“Here’s your wine, love. And some lemon juice”—this to Peterson. “How much, just a dash?”

“That’s splendid, thank you.”

Kiefer sat down and turned to Peterson. “Did Mitsuoko tell you that she spent a year at London University? She’s a brilliant woman, my wife. Ph.D. at twenty-five. Brilliant and beautiful too. I’m a lucky man.” He beamed proudly at her.

“Alex, don’t do that.” The words were sharp but her affectionate smile took the edge off them. She shrugged deprecatingly towards Peterson. “It’s embarrassing. Alex is always boasting about me to his friends.”

“I can understand why.” Behind Peterson’s blandly smiling exterior he calculated. He had only one evening. Did they have an open marriage? How direct an approach would she tolerate? How to broach the subject with Kiefer there? “Your husband tells me that things are pretty bad here too, although it doesn’t look that way to a visitor.”

What did her smile mean? It was almost as though they shared a secret. Was she in fact reading his thoughts? Was she merely flirting? Or could it be—the thought flashed upon him—that she was nervous? She was certainly sending him signals.

“There’s a psychological inability to give up luxury standards,” Kiefer was saying. “People won’t give up a life style that they think is, ah, uniquely American.”

“Is that a current catch phrase?” Peterson asked. “I saw it used in a couple of magazines I read on the plane.”

Kiefer gave this hypothesis his best concerned frown. “Um, ‘uniquely American’? Yeah, I suppose it is. Saw an editorial about something like that this week. Oh, say, excuse me, I’ll go check the boys.”

Kiefer left the room in his eager-terrier style. In a moment Peterson could hear him talking mildly but firmly to the boys somewhere down the hall. They regularly interrupted him with tenor bright-boy-aware-that-he-is-being-bright backtalk. Peterson took a pull on his drink and reflected on the wisdom of proceeding further with Mitsuoko. Kiefer was a link in Peterson’s information-gathering chain, the most essential part of an executive’s working machinery. This was indeed California, notorious California, and the date was well advanced beyond the nineteenth century, but one could never be sure how a husband would react to these things, never mind what they said in theory about the whole matter. But beyond such calculations was the fact that the man irritated him with his fanaticism about health foods and nonsmoking and undignified devotion to those decidedly unpleasant children.

Well, executives were supposed to be able to make quick, incisive decisions, correct? Correct.

He turned to Mitsuoko, seeking the best way to use these moments alone. She was staring out at the view, which she must have memorized ages ago.

Before he could formulate an opening she asked, not looking at him, “Where are you staying, Mr. Peterson?”

“La Valencia. And the name is Ian.”

“Ah, yes. There’s a nice strip of beach there, south of the cove. I often take a walk there in the evenings.” She looked directly at him. “About ten o’clock.”

“I see,” Peterson replied. He felt a pulse beating in his neck. It was the only outward sign of excitement. By God, she had done it. She had made an assignation with him almost under her husband’s nose. Christ, what a woman.

Kiefer came back into the room. “There’s a growing crisis here,” he said.

Petersen gave a snort of laughter which he deftly turned into a cough.

“I think you’re right,” he managed drily. He dared not look at Mitsuoko.

On the long flight over the pole Peterson had time to browse through the file from Caltech. He felt relaxed and pleasantly dissipated, with the slack sensation one gets when he knows he has done quite as much as could be expected along the lines of self-indulgence. No regrets, that was the ticket; it meant one had passed up nothing. To reach the grave with that assurance would surely be at least comforting.

Mitsuoko had rather lived up to the subliminal advanced billing. She had cleared off after three hours, presumably with some solid story, or better, a tacit agreement of no questions from Kiefer. A suitable topping off for a wearing trip.

The Caltech file was something else. There were some grimly detailed internal reports, all a tangle of words and mathematical symbols to him. Markham could frolic in it, if he liked. There were signs that the file hadn’t been freely given over. A Xerox of an official letter, Peterson-inspired, backgrounding for the Council, had scrawled at the bottom Stall them—let’s not get scooped. Surely the author of the note would have lifted that out before making it semipublic. The explanation was obvious. The American government had quite effective internal security people. Rather than trade letters with Caltech, they’d clandestinely photographed whatever they could turn up. Peterson sighed. A dicey method, but then again, not his problem.

The only intelligible portion of the file was a personal letter, presumably stuck in, because of key words.

Dear Jeff,

I’m not going to make it down for Easter; there’s just too much to do here at Caltech. The last few weeks have been extremely exciting. I’m working with a couple of other people and we really don’t want to break off our calculations, even for a holiday in Baja. I’m really sorry about it as I was looking forward to getting together with you both again (if you take my meaning!). I shall miss the prickly cactus and the delicious dry heat, too. Sorry, and maybe next time. Tell Linda I’ll call her for a chat in the next few days if I can find time. Any chance of you people coming up here for a day (or better yet, a night)?

After breaking a promise like this I suppose I ought to tell you what’s stirred me up so. Probably a marine biologist like you won’t think this is of such great concern—cosmology doesn’t count for a lot in the world of enzymes and titrated solutions and all that, I suppose—but to those of us working in the gravitational theory group it looks as though there’s a genuine revolution around the corner. Or maybe it’s already arrived.

It’s related to a problem that’s been hanging around astrophysics for a long time. If there is a certain quantity of matter in the universe, then it has a closed geometry—which means it will eventually stop expanding and begin to contract, pulled back together by gravitational attraction. So people in our line of work have been wondering for some time if there is enough matter in our universe to close off the geometry. So fan direct measurements of the matter in our universe have been inconclusive.

Just counting the luminous stars in the universe gives a small quantity of matter, not enough to close off space-time. But there’s undoubtedly a lot of unseen mass such as dust, dead stars, and black holes.

We’re pretty sure that most galaxies have large black holes at their centers. That accounts for enough missing matter to close off our universe. What’s new is the recent data on how distant galaxies are bunched up together. These galactic-scale clumps mean there are large fluctuations in matter density throughout our universe. If galaxies bunch up together somewhere in our universe, and their density gets high enough, their local space-time geometry could wrap around on itself, in the same way that our universe might be closed.

We now have enough evidence to believe Tommy Gold’s old idea—that there are parts of our universe which have enough clustered galaxies to form their own closed geometry. They won’t look like much to us—just small areas with weak red light coming out of them. The red is from matter still falling into those clumps. The shocker here is that these local density fluctuations qualify as independent universes. The time for forming a separate universe is independent of the size. It goes like the square root of Gn, where G is the gravitational constant and n the density of the contracting region. So it’s independent of the size of the miniuniverse. A small universe will close itself off just as fast as a large one. This means all the various-sized universes have been around for the same amount of “time.” (Defining just what time is in this problem will drive you to drink, if you’re not a mathematician—maybe if you are, too.)

The point here is that there may be closed-off universes inside our own. In fact, it would be a remarkable coincidence if our universe was the largest of all. We may be a local lump inside somebody else’s universe. Remember the old cartoon of a little fish being swallowed by a slightly larger one, in turn about to be swallowed by another bigger one, and so on, ad infinitum? Well, we may be one of those fishes.

The last few weeks I’ve been working on the problem of getting information about—or out of—these universes inside our own. Clearly, light can’t get out of one universe into the next. Neither can matter. That’s what a closed geometry means. The only possibility might be some type of particle that doesn’t fit into the constraints set by Einstein’s theory. There are several candidates like this, but Thorne (the grand old man around here) doesn’t want to get into that morass. Too messy, he says.

I think tachyons are the answer. They can escape from smaller “universes” inside our own. So the recent discovery of tachyons has enormous implications for cosmology. It’s hard to detect tachyons, so we don’t know much about them. They give, us a direct link to the sealed-off space-times inside our universe, though, which is why I’m working so hard on the problem. There’s a chance of a first-class discovery in this. We’ve had the devil of a time pursuing things, with the food strike and the big fire in LA. Probably nobody will give much of a damn, with the world in its present state. But that’s what the academic life is for.

I’m sorry I’ve gone on about this at such length and probably made no sense, but the whole thing is tremendously exciting to me and I tend to get carried away. Anyway, I’m sorry about Baja. Hope to see you both soon. Love, Cathy

Peterson felt a momentary twinge of guilt at reading a private letter. The Council used such methods routinely now, of course, to get quickly round the recalcitrant interests who had not accepted the necessity for quick action. Still, he was a gentleman and a gentleman does not read another’s mail. His reluctance soon, submerged beneath his interest in the implications of what was said by “Cathy.” Subuni-verses? Incredible. The landscape of the scientist was ultimately unreal.

Peterson leaned back in his seat and studied Canadian wastes slipping by below. Yes, perhaps that was it. For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable? Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right.