Timescape

CHAPTER TWELVE

COOPER LAID THE RED-GRIDDED SHEETS OUT IN A long line across the lab countertop. He stood back, balancing on his toes like a sprinter preparing to go the distance, and surveyed his work. The subdued hum of the laboratory underlined the expectation in the air. “That’s it,” Cooper said slowly. “They’re in the right order.”

“That’s our best data?” Gordon murmured.

“Best I’ll ever get,” Cooper said, frowning at something in Gordon’s voice. He turned, hands on hips. “It’s all consecutive, too. Three hours worth.”

“It looks good and clean,” Gordon said in a conciliatory tone. “Sharp.”

“Yeah,” Cooper admitted. “Nothing funny about this. If there was a clear resonance there, I’d see it.”

Gordon traced his finger along the green data lines. There were no standard resonances at all. Inside their sample, cooled down to 3 degrees absolute in the bubbling helium, were atomic nuclei. Each was a tiny magnet. They tended to line up along the magnetic field Cooper had applied to the sample. The standard experiment was simple: apply a brief electromagnetic pulse, which tipped the nuclear magnets away from the magnetic field. In time, the nuclei would line up with the field again. This nuclear relaxation process could tell the experimenter much about the environment inside the solid. It was a relatively simple way to learn about microscopic features of the complex solid structure. Gordon liked the work for its clarity and directness, aside from any applications to transistors or infrared detectors it might eventually have. This branch of solid state physics didn’t have the high visibility of things like quasars or high-energy particle research but it was clean and had a kind of simple beauty.

The jagged traces before him, though, were neither simple nor beautiful. Here and there were fragments of what they should be getting: nuclear resonance curves, smooth and meaningful. But in most of the gridded traces there were sudden jagged line bursts of electromagnetic noise, appearing abruptly for an instant, then disappearing just as suddenly.

“The same spacings,” Gordon murmured.

“Yeah,” Cooper said. “The one-centimeter ones—” he pointed “—and the shorter ones, half a centimeter. Regular as hell.”

Both men looked at each other, then back at the data. Each had hoped for a different result. They had done these experiments over again and again, eliminating all possible sources of noise. The ragged bursts would not vanish.

“It’s a goddam message,” Cooper said. “Must be.”

Gordon nodded, fatigue seeping through him. “There’s no avoiding it,” he said. “We’ve got hours of signal here. Can’t be coincidence, not this much.”

“No.”

“Okay then,” Gordon said, summoning up optimism in his voice. “Let’s decode the fucking thing.”

REDUCTION OF OXYGEN CONTENT TO BELOW TWO PARTS PER MILLION WITHIN FIFTY KILOMETER RADIUS OF SOURCE AFTER DIATOM BLOOM MANIFESTS AEMRUDYCO PEZQEASKL MINOR POLLUTANTS PRESENT IN DEITRICH POLYXTROPE 174A ONE SEVEN FOUR A COMBINES IN LATTITINE CHAIN WITH HERBICIDES SPRINGFIELD AD45 AD FOUR FIVE OR DU PONT ANALAGAN 58 FIVE EIGHT EMITTING FROM REPEATED AGRICULTURAL USE AMAZON BASIN OTHER SITES OTHER LONG CHAIN MOLECULAR SYNERGISTS POSSIBLE IN TROPICAL ENVIRONS OXYGEN COLUMN SUBJECT TO CONVECTIVE SPREADING RATE ALZSNRUD ASMA WSUEXIO 829 CMXDROQ VIRUS IMPRINTING STAGE RESULTS 3 THREE WEEK DELAY IF DENSITY OF SPRINGFIELD AD45 AD FOUR FIVE EXCEEDS 158 ONE FIVE EIGHT PARTS PER MILLION THEN ENTERS MOLECULAR SIMULATION REGIME BEGINS IMITATING HOST CAN THEN CONVERT PLANKTON NEURO JACKET INTO ITS OWN CHEMICAL FORM USING AMBIENT OXYGEN CONTENT UNTIL OXYGEN LEVEL FALLS TO VALUES FATAL TO MOST OF THE HIGHER FOOD CHAIN WTESJDKU AGAIN AMMA YS ACTION OF ULTRAVIOLET SUNLIGHT ON CHAINS APPEARS TO RETARD DIFFUSION IN SURFACE LAYERS OF THE OCEAN BUT GROWTH CONTINUES LOWER DOWN DESPITE CONVECTIVE CELLS FORMING WHICH TEND TO MIX LAYERS IN XMC AHSU URGENT MADUDLO 374 ONLY SEGMENT AMZLSOUDP ALYN YOU MUST STOP ABOVE NAMED SUBSTANCES FROM ENTERING OCEAN LIFE CHAIN AMZSUY RDUCDK BY PROHIBITIONS OF FOLLOWING SUBSTANCES CALLANAN B471 FOUR SEVEN ONE MESTOFITE SALEN MARINE COMPOUND ALPHA THROUGH DELTA YDEMCLW URGENT YXU CONDUCT TITRATION ANALYSIS ON METASTABLE INGREDIENTS PWMXSJR ALSUDNCH

Gordon had no chance to think about the message until the afternoon. His morning was filled out by a lecture and then a committee meeting on graduate student admissions. There were top-flight students applying from all over—Chicago, Caltech, Berkeley, Columbia, MIT, Cornell, Princeton, Stanford. The canonical seats of wisdom. A few unusual cases—two odd ones from Oklahoma who might be promising, a gifted and quiet fellow from Long Beach State—were put aside for study. It was plain that La Jolla’s fame was spreading rapidly. In part it was the continuing heady rush of the Sputnik phenomenon. Gordon was riding that wave himself, and he knew it; these were ripe times for science. He wondered, though, about the students just now coming into physics. Some of them seemed like the same sort that went into law or medicine—not because it was a fascinating subject, but because it promised big bucks. Gordon wondered privately whether Cooper had elements of that; the man showed sparks of the old flame, but it lay hidden beneath a blanket of mellow relaxation, an aura of physical assurance. Even the message, the very existence of a message, struck Cooper as a little funny but basically acceptable, an odd effect, soon to be explained. Gordon could not tell whether this was a pose or genuine serenity; either way, it was unsettling. Gordon was used to a more intense style. He envied the physicists who had made the great discoveries when quantum mechanics was unfolding, when the nucleus first shattered. The older members of the department, Eckart and Lieberman, talked of those days sometimes. Before the 1940s, a degree in physics was a solid basis for a career in electrical engineering, period. The bomb had changed all that. In the avalanche of gaudy weapons, new fields of study, increased budgets, and expanding horizons, everyone discovered suddenly a national thirst for physicists. In the years following Hiroshima a newspaper story referring to a physicist invariably called him “the brilliant nuclear physicist,” as though there could be no other kind. Physics got fatter. Even so, physicists were still relatively poorly paid; Gordon could remember a visiting professor at Columbia borrowing money to attend the Friday “Chinese lunch” Lee and Yang had started up. The lunches met in one of the excellent Chinese restaurants ringing the campus, and it was there that new results often surfaced first. Attendance was a good idea if you wanted to keep up. So the visiting scholar had scrounged enough to go, and paid it back within a week. Such days seemed distant to Gordon now, though they must loom large in the minds of the older physicists, he realized. Some, like Lakin, carried an air of uneasy waiting, as though the bubble would soon burst. The dazed public, with its short attention span, would be distracted by the cornucopia of tail fins and ranch-style tract homes, and forget about science. The easy equation—science equals engineering equals consumer yummies—would fade. Physics had spent more time at the bottom of the S curve than chemistry—World War I was the flush time for them—and now was enjoying the steep climb. But a plateau had to follow. The S curve had to curl over.

Gordon mulled this over as he made his way from the laboratory up the outside stairs to Lakin’s office. The lab notebooks were carefully organized and he had checked over the decoding of the message repeatedly. Still, he was of half a mind to turn around and avoid seeing Lakin at all.

He was only a few sentences into his presentation when Lakin said, “Really, Gordon, I had trusted you would fix this trouble by now.”

“Isaac, these are the facts.”

“No.” The trimly built man got up from behind his desk and began to pace. “I have looked into your experiment in detail. I read your notes—Cooper showed me where they were.”

Gordon frowned. “Why not ask me for them?”

“You were in class. And—I speak frankly—I wanted to see Cooper’s own entries, in his own hand.”

“Why?”

“You admit you did not take all the data by yourself.”

“No, of course not. He’s got to do something for a thesis.”

“And he is behind schedule, yes. Significantly behind.” Lakin stopped and made one of his characteristic movements, dipping his head slightly and raising his eyebrows as he looked at Gordon, as though gazing over the rims of nonexistent eyeglasses. Gordon supposed this was a glance meant to convey something unprovable but obvious, an unspoken understanding between colleagues.

“I don’t think he’s faking it, if that’s what you mean,” he said very steadily, keeping inflection out of his voice with some effort.

“How could you tell?”

“The data I took fits in with the syntax of the rest of the message.”

“That could be a deliberate effect, somehow cooked up by Cooper.” Lakin turned toward the window, hands clasped behind his back, his voice now carrying a shade of hesitation.

“Come on, Isaac.”

Lakin suddenly rounded on him. “Very well You tell me, then, what is going on,” he said crisply.

“We have an effect, but no explanation. That’s what’s going on. Nothing more.” He waved the page of decoded message in the air, slicing blades of sunlight descending from the windows.

“Then we are agreed.” Lakin smiled. “A very strange effect. Something makes the nuclear spins relax, bing, like that. Spontaneous resonance.”

“Thai’s crap.” Gordon had thought they were really homing in on the point, and now this old song and dance came up.

“It is a simple statement of what we know.”

“How do you explain this?” He waved the message again.

“I do not.” Lakin shrugged elaborately. “I would not even mention it, if I were you.”

“Until we understand it—”

“No. We do understand enough. Enough to talk in public about spontaneous resonance.” Lakin began a technical summary, ticking off the points on his fingers with a precise gesture. Gordon could see he had grilled Cooper thoroughly. Lakin knew how to present the data, which quantities to plot, how the figures in a paper could build a very convincing case. “Spontaneous resonance” would make an interesting paper. No, an exciting one.

When Lakin was finished, and had sketched out the scientific arguments, Gordon said casually, “Half a true story can still be a lie, you know.”

Lakin grimaced. “I’ve humored you quite a bit, Gordon. For months. It is time to admit the truth.”

“Uh huh. What is it?”

“That your techniques are still faulty.”

“How?”

“I do not know.” He shrugged, dipping his head and raising his eyebrows again. “I cannot be in the laboratory constantly.”

“We have been able to array the resonance signals—”

“So they seem to say something.” Lakin smiled tolerantly. “They could say anything, Gordon, if you fool with them enough. Look—” He spread his hands. “You remember, from astronomy, the fellow Lowell?”

“Yes,” Gordon said suspiciously.

“He ‘discovered’ the canals on Mars. Saw them for years, decades. Other people reported, seeing them. Lowell had his own observatory built in the desert, he was a rich man. He had excellent seeing conditions there. The man had time and fine eyesight. So he discovered evidence of intelligence.”

“Yeah, but—” Gordon began.

“The only mistake was that he had the wrong conclusion. The intelligent life was on his side of the telescope, not the Mars end. His mind—” Lakin jabbed a forefinger at his own temple “—saw a flickering image and then imposed order on it. His own intelligence was tricking him.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Gordon said sourly He couldn’t think of a counterargument. Lakin was better at these things, knew more stories, had a subtle instinct for maneuver.

“I propose that we not turn ourselves into Low-ells.”

“Publish the spontaneous resonance stuff right away,” Gordon said, trying to think.

“Yes. We have to finish the NSF proposal this week. We can feature the spontaneous resonance material. I can write it up from the notebooks, in such a way that we can use the same manuscript for a paper to Physical Review Letters”

“What good will it do to send it to PRL?” Gordon asked, trying to decide what his reaction was.

“In our NSF proposal we can list the paper in the reference? page as ‘submitted to PRL.’ That puts an earmark on it, says it is work of foremost quality. In fact…” he pursed his lips, judging, peering over imaginary hornrims, “… why not say ‘to be published in PRL’? I am certain they will accept it, and ‘to be published’ carries more weight.”

“It’s not true.”

“It soon will be.” Lakin sat down behind his desk and leaned forward on it, hands clasped together. “And I tell you frankly that without something interesting, something new, the grant is in trouble.”

Gordon looked at him steadily for a long moment. Lakin got up and resumed pacing. “No, of course, it was only a thought. We will say ‘submitted to’ and that will have to do it.” He circumnavigated the office with a measured step, thinking. He stopped before the blackboard with its crude sketches of the data. “A very odd effect, and a credit to its discoverer—you.”

“Isaac,” Gordon said carefully, “I’m not going to drop this.”

“Fine, fine,” Lakin said, taking Gordon’s arm. “Throw yourself into it. I’m sure the business with Cooper will resolve itself in time. You should arrange the date of his doctoral candidacy exam, you know.”

Gordon nodded absently. To set out on a full research program for the thesis, a student had to pass the two-hour oral candidacy examination. Cooper would need some coaching; he tended to freeze up if more than two faculty members were within earshot, a remarkably common effect among students. “I’m glad we have this settled,” Lakin murmured. “I’ll show you a draft of the PRL paper on Monday. Meanwhile—” he glanced at his watch—“the Colloquium is starting.”

Gordon tried to concentrate on the Colloquium lecture but somehow the thread of the argument kept eluding him. Only a few rows away Murray GellMann was explaining the “Eight-Fold Way” scheme for understanding the basic particles of all matter. Gordon knew he should be following the discussion closely, for here was a genuinely fundamental question. The particle theorists already said Gell-Mann should get the Nobel for this work. He frowned and shifted forward in his seat, peering at Gell-Mann’s equations. Someone in the audience asked a skeptical question and Gell-Mann turned, always smooth and unperturbed, to counter it. The audience followed the exchange with interest. Gordon remembered his senior year at Columbia, when he had first begun attending the Physics Department Colloquia. He had noticed an obvious feature of the weekly meetings, one he never heard talked about. Anyone could ask a question, and when he did all attention of the audience turned to him. If there were several exchanges between lecturer and questioner, all the better. And a questioner who caught the speaker in an error was rewarded with nodding heads and smiles from those around him. All this was clear, and it was doubly clear that no one in the audience prepared for the Colloquia, no one studied for them.

The Colloquium topic was announced a week in advance. Gordon began reading up on the topic and taking down a few notes. He would look up the speaker’s papers, with special attention to the Conclusions section, where authors usually speculated a bit, threw out “blue sky” ideas, and occasionally took indirect slams at their competitors. Then he would read the competitors’ papers as well. This always generated several good questions. Occasionally such a question, innocently asked, could puncture a speaker’s ideas like a stiletto. This would create a murmur of interest in the audience, and inquiring glances toward Gordon. Even an ordinary question, if well delivered, created the impression of deep understanding. Gordon began by calling out questions from near the back. After a few weeks he moved forward. The senior professors in the department always took the first-row seats, and soon he was sitting only two rows behind them. They began turning in their seats to watch as he asked a question. Within a few more weeks he was in the second row. Full professors began to nod to him as they took their seats before Colloquium began. By Christmas Gordon was known to most of the department. He had felt a slight tug of guilt about it ever since, but, after all, he hadn’t done anything except show a keen and systematic interest. If it benefited him, so much the better. He had been a demon for physics and mathematics then, more interested in watching a lecturer pull an analytic rabbit out of a higher mathematical hat than in a Broadway show. Once he spent a whole week trying to crack Fermat’s Last Theorem, skipping lectures to scribble away. Somewhere around 1650, Pierre de Fermat jotted the equation xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿin the margin of his copy of Diophantus’ Arithmetic. Fermat wrote that if x, y, z, and n were positive integers, there were no solutions to the equation for n greater than two. “The proof is too long to write in this margin,” Fermat scribbled. In the 300 years since, no one had been able to prove it. Was Fermat bluffing? Maybe there wasn’t a proof. Anyone who could decide the issue with a mathematical demonstration would be famous. Gordon struggled with the riddle and then, falling behind in classes, gave it up. But he swore that some day he would get back to it.

The Last Theorem had a lot of mathematical beauty in it, but that wasn’t why he had attacked it. He liked solving problems, simply because they were there. Most scientists did; they were early chess players and puzzle solvers. That, and ambition, were the two traits scientists truly had in common, it seemed to him. Gordon mused for a moment on how different he and Lakin were, despite their common scientific interests—and then suddenly sat upright. Heads nearby turned at this quick movement. Gordon ran the conversation with Lakin through his mind, remembering how his talk about the message had been neatly deflected, first into a dodge about Cooper, then the Lowell story, followed by Lakin’s seeming to back down on the “to be published in PRL” business. Lakin got the PRL he wanted, with Gordon and Cooper as coauthors, and Gordon had nothing more than the typescript of his message.

Gell-Mann was describing, in his precise way, a detailed pyramid of particles arranged by mass, spin, and various quantum numbers. It was all a meaningless jumble to Gordon. He reached into his vest pocket—he always put on a jacket for Colloquium, if not a tie as well—and brought out the message. He stared at it a moment and stood up. The audience for Gell-Mann was huge, the biggest draw of the year. They all seemed to be watching him as he worked his way through the forest of knees to the aisle. He walked out of the Colloquium a little unsteadily, the message paper twisted in his hand. Eyes followed him as he went out a side door.

“Does it make sense?” Gordon said intensely to the sandy-haired man across the desk from him.

“Well, yeah, sort of.”

“The chemistry is legitimate?”

Michael Ramsey spread his palms upward. “Sure, as much as I can follow. These industrial names—’Springfield AD45, Du Pont Analagan 58’—don’t mean anything to me. Maybe they’re still under development.”

“What it says about the ocean, and this stuff reacting together—”

Ramsey shrugged. “Who knows? We’re babes in the woods about a lot of this long-chain molecule stuff. Just because we can make plastic raincoats, don’t think we’re wizards.”

“Look, I came over to Chemistry to get help in understanding that message. Who would know more about it?”

Ramsey sat back in his reclining office chair, squinting unconsciously at Gordon, plainly trying to assess the situation. After a moment he said quietly, “Where’d you get this information?”

Gordon shifted uneasily in his chair. “I’m… look, keep this quiet.”

“Sure, Sure.”

“I’ve been getting some… strange… signals in an experiment of mine. Signals where there shouldn’t be any.”

Ramsey squinted again. “Uh huh.”

“Look, I know this stuff isn’t very clear. Just fragments of sentences.”

“That’s what you’d expect, isn’t it?”

“Expect? From what?”

“An intercepted message, picked up by one of our listening stations in Turkey.” Ramsey smiled with a touch of glee, his skin around the blue eyes crinkling so that his freckles folded together.

Gordon fingered the tip of his button-down collar, opened his mouth and then closed it.

“Oh, come on,” Ramsey said, cheerful now that he had penetrated on obvious cover story. “I know about all that tip-top secret stuff. Lots of guys try their hand at it. Government can’t get enough qualified people to pick over this stuff, so they bring in a consultant.”

“I’m not working for the government. I mean, outside of NSF—”

“Sure, I’m not saying you are. There’s that working panel Department of Defense has, what do they call it? Jason, yeah. A lot of bright guys in there. Hal Lewis up at Santa Barbara, Rosenbluth from here, sharp people. Did you do any of that ICBM reentry work for DOD?”

“Can’t say as I did,” Gordon said with deliberate mildness. Which is precisely the truth, he thought.

“Ha! Good phrase. Can’t say, not that you didn’t do. What was it Mayor Daley said? ‘Coming clean isn’t the same as taking a bath.’ I won’t ask you to give away your sources.”

Gordon found himself fingering his collar again and discovered the button was nearly twisted off. In the New York days his mother had had to sew one back on every week or so. Lately his rate had gotten lower, but today—

“I’m surprised the Soviets are talking about this sort of thing, though,” Ramsey murmured, thinking to himself. The narrowing around his eyes had relaxed and he slipped back into the mold of experimental organic chemist pondering a problem. “They’re not very far along in these directions. In fact, at the last Moscow meeting I attended I could’ve sworn they were way behind us. They’ve pushed fertilizer for that five-year plan of theirs. Nothing of this complexity.”

“Why the American and English brand names?” Gordon said intently, leaning forward in his chair. “Dupont and Springfield. And this—’emitting from repeated agricultural use Amazon basin other sites’ and so on.”

“Yeah,” Ramsey allowed, “Seems funny. Don’t suppose it’s got anything to do with Cuba, do you? That’s the only place the Russians are monkeying around in South America.”

“Ummm.” Gordon frowned, nodding to himself.

Ramsey studied Gordon’s face. “Ah, maybe that makes sense. Some kind of Castro side action in the Amazon? A little under-the-counter aid to the backwoods people, to make the guerrillas more popular? Might make sense.”

“That seems a little complicated, doesn’t it? I mean, the other parts about the plankton neurojacket and so on.”

“Yeah, I don’t understand that. Maybe it’s not even part of the same transmission.” He looked up. “Can’t you get a better transcription than this? Those radio eavesdroppers—”

“I’m afraid that’s the best I can do. You understand,” he added significantly.

Ramsey pursed his lips and nodded. “If DOD is so interested they’d farm out info like this… Tantalizing, isn’t it? Must be something to it.”

Gordon shrugged. He didn’t dare say anything more. This was a delicate game, letting Ramsey talk himself into a cloak-and-dagger explanation, without actually telling him anything that was an outright lie. He had come over to the Chemistry Department prepared to lay things on the line, but he now realized that would have got him nowhere. Better to play it this way.

“I like it,” Ramsey said decisively. He slapped his palm with a whack onto a pile of examinations on his desk. “I like it a lot. Damned funny puzzle, and DOD interested. Bound to be something in it. Think we can get funding?”

This took Gordon aback. “Well, I don’t… I hadn’t thought…”

Ramsey nodded again. “Right, I get it. DOD isn’t going to pony up for every blue-sky idea that floats by. They want some backup work.”

“A down payment.”

“Yeah. Some preliminary data. That’ll make a better case for pursuing the idea.” He paused, as though juggling schedules in his mind. “I have some idea how we could start. Can’t do it right’ away, you understand. Lots of other work under way here.” He relaxed, leaned back in his swivel chair, grinned. “Send me a Xerox of it and let me mull it over, huh? I like a puzzle like this. Puts a little zip in things. I appreciate your bringing it by, letting me in.”

“And I’m happy you’re interested,” Gordon murmured. His smile had a wry and distant quality.