Timescape

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

GORDON OPENED THE SAN DIEGO UNION AND SPREAD it out on the lab workbench. He wished immediately that he had taken the trouble to find a copy of the Los Angeles Times, because the Union in its usual country-bumpkin manner devoted a lot of space to the wedding between Hope Cooke, the recent Sarah Lawrence graduate, and Crown Prince Palden Thon-up Namgyal of Sikkim. The Union seemed all a-twitter that an American girl would marry a man who would become a maharajah, just any day now. The real news appeared only as a minor article on the front page: Davey Moore was dead. Gordon thumbed impatiently back to the sports page and was mollified to find a longer story. Sugar Ramos had knocked out Moore in the tenth round of their bout for the featherweight title, in Los Angeles. Gordon wished again that he had got tickets; the press of classes and research had made it slip his mind until they were all sold out. So Moore had died of a cerebral hemorrhage without regaining consciousness; another blot on boxing. Gordon sighed. There were the predictable comments from the predictable people, calling for an end to the whole sport. He wondered for a moment if they might be right.

“Here’s the new stuff,” Cooper said at his elbow.

Gordon took the data sheets. “More signal?”

“Yep,” Cooper said flatly. “I’ve been getting good resonance curves for weeks now, and all of a sudden—whacko.”

“You decoded it?”

“Sure. A lot of repetition in it, for some reason.”

Gordon followed Cooper over to Cooper’s working area, where the lab notebooks were spread out. He found himself hoping the results would be nonsense, simply interference. It would be much easier that way. He wouldn’t have to worry about any messages, Cooper could proceed on his thesis, Lakin would be happy. His life didn’t need any complication right now, and he had hoped the whole spontaneous resonance effect would go away. Their Physical Review Letters note had aroused interest and nobody in the field had criticized the work; maybe it was best to leave matters that way.

His hopes faded as he studied Cooper’s blocky printing.

The mystifying chant of letters and numbers ran on for three pages. Then it abruptly stopped and there followed:

After this came nothing sensible. Gordon studied Cooper’s data. “The rest of this stuff looks like simple on and off. No code to it.” Cooper nodded, and scratched his leg beneath his cutaway jeans shorts. “Just dots and dashes,” Gordon muttered to himself. “Funny” Cooper nodded again. Gordon had noticed lately that Cooper now confined himself to taking the data and venturing no opinions. Perhaps the clash with Lakin had taught him that an agnostic posture was safer. Cooper seemed happy enough when he was getting conventional resonance signals; they were the field stones which would build his thesis.

“This earlier stuff—RA and DEC” Gordon stroked his chin. “Something astronomical about that…”

“Ummmm,” Cooper volunteered. “Maybe so.”

“Yes—Right Ascension and Declination. These are coordinates, fixing a point in space.”

“Huh. Could be.”

Gordon glanced at Cooper irritably. There was such a thing as playing cards too close to your vest. “Look, I want to look into this. Just keep on taking measurements.”

Cooper nodded and turned away, obviously relieved to be rid of the perplexing data. Gordon left the lab and went up two floors to 317, Bernard Carroway’s office. There was no answer to his knock. He went by the department office, leaned in and called, “Joyce, where is Dr. Carroway?” By convention, office personnel were called by their first names, while faculty always had a title. Gordon had always felt slightly uncomfortable about going along with the practice.

“The big one or the little one?” the dark-haired department secretary said, raising her eyebrows; she scarcely ever let them rest.

“Big one. In mass, not height.”

“Astrophysics seminar. It should be nearly over.”

He slipped quietly into the seminar as John Boyle was finishing a lecture; the green blackboards were covered with differential equations from Boyle’s new gravitation theory. Boyle finished with a flourish, mixing in a Scotsman’s joke, and the seminar broke up into rivulets of conversation. Bernard Carroway heaved himself up and led a discussion between Boyle and a third man Gordon didn’t know. He leaned over and asked Bob Gould, “Who’s that?” Gordon nodded at the tall, curly-haired man.

“Him? Saul Shriffer, from Yale. He and Frank Drake did that Project Ozma thing, listening for radio signals from other civilizations.”

“Oh.” Gordon leaned back and watched Shriffer argue with Boyle over a technical point. He felt a humming energy in himself, the scent of the hunt. He had put aside the whole matter of the messages for several months, in the face of Lakin’s indifference and the disappearance of the effect. But now it was back and he was suddenly sure he should press the issue.

Boyle and Shriffer were arguing over the validity of an approximation John had made to simplify an equation. Gordon watched with interest. It wasn’t a cool intellectual discourse between men of reason, as the layman so often pictured. It was a warming argument, with muted shouts and gestures. They were arguing over ideas, but beneath the surface personalities clashed. Shriffer was much the noisier of the two. He pressed down hard with the chalk, snapping it in two. He flapped his arms, shrugged, frowned. He wrote and talked rapidly, frequently refuting what he himself had been saying only moments before. He made careless mistakes in the calculation, repairing them as he went with swipes of an eraser. The trivial errors weren’t important—he was trying to capture the essence of the problem. The exact solution could come later. His hasty scrawl covered the board.

Boyle was totally different. He spoke with an even, almost monotonous voice, in contrast to the quick, jabbing tone Gordon remembered from the Limehouse. This was his scientific persona. Occasionally his voice was pitched so low Gordon had to strain to hear him. Those nearby would have to stop their side-talk to listen—a neat tactic to insure their attention. He never interrupted Shriffer. He began his sentences with “I think if we try this…” or “Saul, don’t you see what will happen if…” A form of oneupmanship. He never made a forceful, positive assertion; he was the dispassionate seeker of truth. But gradually the effort of sticking to this low-key role showed. He couldn’t prove rigorously that his approximation was justified, so he was reduced to a holding action. In sum his approach amounted to a repeated invitation to “prove that I’m wrong.” Gradually, his voice rose. His face tightened into stubbornness.

Suddenly Saul claimed he knew how to refute John’s approximation. His idea was to solve a particularly simple test problem where they already knew what the answer should be. Saul zoomed through the calculation. Only for one narrow range of physical conditions did the approximation give the right answer. “There! Sec it’s no good.”

John shook his head. “Bugger off—it works precisely for the most interesting case.”

Saul seethed. “Nonsense! You’ve thrown all the long wave lengths out of the problem.”

But heads nodded around them. John had won. Since the embattled approximation was not totally useless, it was acceptable. Saul grudgingly agreed and a moment later was smiling and discussing something else, the issue forgotten. There was no point in remaining excited about an issue where something could be proved. Gordon grinned. It was an example of what he thought of as the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

He approached Carroway and held out the coordinates from his message. “Bernard, do you have any idea where this is in the sky?”

Carroway blinked owlishly at the numbers. “No, no, I never remember such details. Saul?” He pointed at the paper.

“Near Vega,” Saul said. “I’ll look it up for you, if you want.”

After his lecture on Classical Electrodynamics Gordon intended to search out Saul Shriffer, but when he dropped by his office to leave off his lecture notes someone was waiting. It was Ramsey, the chemist.

“Say, thought I’d zip by and update you,” Ramsey said. “I looked into that little riddle you gave me.”

“Oh?”

“I think there’s some real meat there. We’re a long way from understanding much about long-chain molecules, y’know, but I’m interested in that puzzle. The part where it says, ‘enters molecular simulation regime begins imitating host.’ That sounds like a self-replicating mechanism we don’t know beans about.”

“Does that happen with the molecular forms you know?”

Ramsey’s brow wrinkled. “Nope. But I’ve been studying the special fertilizing forms some of the companies are experimenting with, and… well, it’s too early to say. Just a hunch, really. What I came to tell you is that I haven’t forgotten about the thing. Classes and my regular grants, y’know—they stack up on you. But I’ll keep nudging along at it. Might go down and bug Walter Munk about the oceanography connection. Anyway—” he stood, giving a mock salute of goodbye—“I appreciate the info. Might be a good lead. Gratz a lots.”

“Huh?”

“Gratz—gracias. Spanish.”

“Oh. Sure.” The cavalier Californian appropriation of Spanish slang seemed apt for Ramsey. Yet beneath the used-car salesman manner a quick mind worked. Gordon was glad the man was looking into the first message and hadn’t let it fall into a crack. This seemed to be a lucky day; threads were weaving together. Yes, a lucky day. “I’d give it an A plus so far,” Gordon mused to himself, and went looking for Shriffer.

“I nailed it for you,” Saul said decisively, finger arrowing down at a speck on a star chart. It’s a point very close to a normal F7 star, named 99 Hercules.”

“But not smack on it?”

“No, but very close. What’s behind all this, anyway? What’s a solid state physicist need a star position for?”

Gordon told him about the persistent signals and showed him Cooper’s recent decoding. Saul quickly became excited. He and a Russian, Kadarsky, were writing a paper together on the detection of extraterrestrial civilizations. Their operating assumption was that radio signals were the natural choice. But if Gordon’s signals were indeed unexplainable in terms of earthly transmissions, Saul suggested, why not consider the hypothesis of extraterrestrial origin? The coordinates clearly pointed that way.

“See—Right Ascension is 18 hours, 5 minutes, 36 seconds. Now, 99 Hercules is this dot at 18 hours, 5 minutes, 8 seconds, a little off. Declination of your signal is 30 degrees, 29.2 minutes. That fits.”

“So? They don’t agree exactly.”

“But they’re damned close!” Saul waved his hands. “A few seconds difference is nothing.”

“How in hell does an extraterrestrial know our system of astronomical measurements?” Gordon said skeptically.

“How do they know our language? By listening to our old radio programs, of course. Look—parallax for 99 Hercules is a 0.06. That means it’s over sixteen parsecs away.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, about 51 light years.”

“How could they be signaling, then? Radio came in about sixty years ago. There hasn’t been time for light to go the round trip—it would take over a century. So they can’t be answering our own radio stations.”

“True.” Saul appeared momentarily deflated. “You say there’s some more to the message?” He brightened. “Let me see.”

After a moment he stabbed the printed message and exclaimed, “Right! That’s it. See this word?”

“Which?”

“Tachyon. Greek origin. Means ‘fast one,’ I’ll bet. That means they’re using some faster-than-light transmission.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Gordon, use your imagination. It fits, damn it!”

“Nothing travels faster than light.”

“This message says something does.”

“Crap. Just crap.”

“Okay, how do you explain this? ‘Should appear as point source in tachyon spectrum 263 KEV peak.’ KEV—kilovolts. They’re using tachyons, whatever they are, of energy 263 kilovolts.”

“Doubtful,” Gordon said severely.

“What about the rest? ‘Can verify with NMR directionality. Measurement follows.’ NMR—Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. Then garbage, a few more words, then garbage again. SMISSION FROM 19BD 1998COORGHQE and so on.”

“Not all garbage. See—the rest is simple dots and dashes.”

“Hummm.” Saul peered at the pattern. “Interesting.”

“Look, Saul, I appreciate the—”

“Wait a sec. 99 Hercules isn’t just any star, you know. I looked it up. It fits into the kind of star class we think might support life.”

Gordon purses his lips and looked dubious.

“Right, it’s an F7. Slightly heavier than our sun—more massive, I mean—and with a big region around it capable of supporting life. It’s a binary star—wait, wait, I know what you’re going to say,” Saul said dramatically, pushing his open, upright palm toward Gordon, who had no idea what he was going to say. “Binary stars can’t have livable planets around them, right?”

“Uh, why not?”

“Because the planets get perturbed. Only 99 Hercules doesn’t have that problem. The two stars circle each other only every 54.7 years. They’re far apart, with livable spaces around each of them.”

“Both are F7s?”

“As far as we can tell, the bigger one is. You only need one,” he added lamely.

Gordon shook his head. “Saul, I appreciate—”

“Gordon, let me have a look at that message. The dots and dashes, I mean.”

“Sure, okay.”

“Do me a favor. I think there’s something big here. Maybe our ideas about radio communication and the 21-centimeter line of hydrogen being the natural choice—maybe they’re all wrong. I want to check this message of yours out. Just don’t make up your mind. Okay?”

“Okay,” Gordon said reluctantly.

When Gordon lugged his briefcase into his office the next morning, Saul was waiting for him. The sight of Saul’s eager face, with brown eyes that danced as he spoke, filled him with a premonition.

“I cracked it,” Saul said tersely. “The message.”

“What… ?”

“The dots and dashes at the end? That spelled no words? They aren’t words—they’re a picture!”

Gordon gave him a skeptical look and put down his briefcase.

“I counted the dashes in that long transmission. ‘Noise,’ you said. There were 1537 dashes.”

“So?”

“Frank Drake and I and a lot of otter people have been thinking of ways to transfer pictures by simple on-off signals. It’s simple—send a rectangular grid.”

“That scrambled part of the message? RECTANGULAR CO-ORDMZALS and so on.”

“Correct. To lay out a grid you need to know how many lines to take on each axis. I tried a bunch of combinations that multiply out to 1537. All gave a mess, except a 29-by-53 grid. Laying the dashes out on that scheme gave a picture. And 29 and 53 are both prime numbers—the obvious choice, when you think about it. There is only that one way to break 1537 down into a product of primes.”

“Ummm. Very clever. And this is the picture?”

Saul handed Gordon a sheet of graph paper with a point filled in for each dash in the transmission. It showed a complex interweaving set of curves moving from right to left. Each curve was made of clusters of dots, arranged in a regular but complicated pattern. “What is it?” Gordon asked.

“I don’t know. All the practice problems Frank and I made up gave pictures showing solar systems, with one planet picked out—things like that. This one doesn’t look anything like that.”

Gordon tossed the drawing on his desk. “Then what use is it?”

“Well—hell! An immense amount of good, once we figure it out.”

“Well…”

“What’s the matter? You think this is wrong?”

“Saul, I know you’ve got a reputation for thinking about—what’s that Hermann Kahn calls it?—the unthinkable. But this—!”

“You think I’m making all this up?”

“Me? Me? Saul, I detected this message. I showed it to you. But your explanation—! Faster-than-light telegraph signals from another star. But the coordinates don’t quite fit! A picture coming out of the noise. But the picture makes no sense! Come on, Saul.”

Saul’s face reddened and he stepped back, hands on hips. “You’re blind, you know that? Blind.”

“Let’s say… skeptical.”

“Gordon, you’re not giving me a break.”

“Break? I admit you’ve got some sort of case. But until we understand that picture of yours, it doesn’t hold water.”

“Okay. O-kay,” Saul said dramatically, smacking a fist into his left palm. “I’ll find out what that drawing means. We’ll have to go to the whole academic community to solve the riddle.”

“What’s that mean?”

“We’ll have to go public.”

“Ask around?”

“Ask who? What specialty? Astrophysics? Biology? When you don’t know, you have to keep your mind open.”

“Yes… but…” Gordon suddenly remembered Ramsey. “Saul, there’s another message.”

“What?”

“I got it months ago. Here.” He rummaged through his desk drawers and found the transcript. “Try that on for size.”

Saul studied the long typed lines. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do L”

“You’re sure this is valid?”

“As sure as I am of what you’ve already deciphered.”

“Shit.” Saul collapsed into a chair. “This really confuses things.”

“Yes, it does, doesn’t it?”

“Gordon, it makes no sense”

“Neither does your picture.”

“Look, maybe you’re getting conflicting messages. When you tune into different radio stations, you get music on one, sports on another, current events on a third. Maybe you’ve got a receiver here that just scoops up everything.”

“Um.”

Saul leaned forward in his chair and pressed his palms against his temples. Gordon realized the man was tired. He had probably stayed up all night working on the breakdown of the picture. He felt a sudden burst of sympathy for him. Saul was already known as a proponent of the interstellar communication idea, and a lot of astronomers thought he was too wild, too speculative, too young and impulsive. Well, so what—that didn’t mean he was wrong.

“Okay, Saul, I’ll accept the picture idea—provisionally. It can’t be an accident. So—what is it? We have to find out.” He told Saul about Ramsey. That merely complicated matters, but he felt Saul had a right to know.

“Gordon, I still think we’ve got something here.”

“So do I.”

“I think we ought to go public.”

“With the biochemistry, too? The first message?”

“No…” Saul thought. “No, just with this second message. It’s clear. It repeats itself for pages. How often did you get that first signal?”

“Once.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Then let’s forget it.”

“Why?”

“It might be a decoding error.”

Gordon remembered Lakin’s story about Lowell. “Well…”

“Look, I’ve got a lot more experience with these things than you do. I know what people will say. If you muddy the water around a subject, nobody jumps in.”

“We’d be withholding information.”

“Withholding, yes. But not forever. Just until we find out what the picture means.”

“I don’t like it.”

“We’ll give them only one problem at a time.” Saul raised a finger. “One problem. Later, we’ll tell the whole story.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Gordon, look. I think this is the way to do it. Will you take my advice?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll take it, go public. I’m known. I’m a crazy guy who fools around with interstellar radio signals and all that stuff. A certified authority on a nonexistent subject. I can get the attention of the academic community.”

“Yeah, but…”

“One problem at a time, Gordon!”

“Well…”

“First, the picture. Later, the rest.”

“Well…” Gordon had a class coming up. Saul had a hypnotic quality about him, the ability to make notions seem plausible and even obvious. But, Gordon thought, a sow’s ear with a ribbon around it was still a sow’s ear. Still… “Okay. You get into the ring. I’m staying out.”

“Hey, thanks.” Suddenly Saul was shaking his head. “I appreciate that. I really do. It’s a great break.”

“Yeah,” Gordon said. But he felt no elation.

The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite came on as Gordon and Penny were finishing dinner. She had made a soufflé and Gordon had uncorked a white Beaujolais; both were feeling quite flush. They moved into the living room to watch. Penny took off her blouse, revealing small well-shaped breasts with large nipples.

“How do you know it’ll be on?” she asked lazily.

“Saul called this afternoon. He did an interview in Boston this morning. The local CBS station did the work, but he said the national network picked it up. Maybe there isn’t much else going on.” He glanced around to be sure the curtains were drawn.

“Ummm. Looks that way.” There was one big story—the nuclear powered submarine Thresher had gone down in the Atlantic without a single cry for help. They had been on a test dive. The Navy said that probably a system failure created progressive flooding. The interference with electrical circuits caused loss of power and the sub plunged to deeper waters, finally imploding. There were 129 men aboard.

Other than this depressing news there was very little. A follow-up on the Mona Lisa exhibit which toured New York and Washington, D.C. A preview of the launch of Major L. Gordon Cooper, Jr., who was to be launched on a 22-orbit, two-day trip around the earth in Faith 7, the final flight of Project Mercury. A statement by the White House that aid to South Vietnam would continue and that the war might be won by the end of 1965 if the political crisis there did not significantly affect the military effort. Generals grinned at the camera, promising a firm effort by the ARVN and a short mop-up operation in the delta region. In New York, efforts to save Pennsylvania Station had failed, and the classic edifice began to fall to the wrecker’s ball to make way for the new Madison Square Garden. The Pan Am Building, dedicated a month earlier, seemed the wave of the urban-blighted future. On camera, a critic decried the fall of Perm Station and declared the Pan Am an architectural atrocity, contributing to congestion in an already crowded area. Gordon agreed. The critic closed with a wistful remark that meeting beneath the clock at the Biltmore hotel, just across the street from the Pan Am, wasn’t going to be much of a joy any more. Gordon laughed to himself without quite understanding why. His sympathies suddenly reversed. He had never met a girl at the Biltmore; that was the sort of empty WASP ritual open to Yalies and kids who identified with The Catcher in the Rye. That wasn’t his world and never had been. “If that’s the past, fuck it,” he muttered under his breath. Penny gave him a questioning glance but said nothing. He grunted impatiently. Maybe the wine was getting to him.

Then Saul came on.

“From Yale University this evening, a startling announcement,” Cronkite began. “Professor Saul Shriffer, an astrophysicist, says that there is a possibility that recent experiments have detected a message from a civilization beyond our Earth.”

They switched to a shot of Saul pointing to a speck on a star chart. “The signals appear to come from the star 99 Hercules, similar to our own sun. 99 Hercules is 51 light years away. A light year is the distance—”

“They’re giving it so much time” Penny said wonderingly.

“Shhh!”

“—light travels in a year, at a speed of 186,000 miles per second.” A shot of Saul standing beside a small telescope. “The possible message was detected in a way astronomers had not anticipated—in an experiment by Professor Gordon Bernstein—”

“Oh, Jesus,” Gordon groaned.

“—at the University of California at La Jolla. The experiment involved a low-temperature measurement of how atoms line up in a magnetic field. The Bernstein experiments are still being studied—it is not certain that they are, in fact, picking up some signal from a distant civilization. But Professor Shriffer, a collaborator with Bernstein who broke the code in the signal, says he wants to alert the scientific community.” A picture of Saul writing equations at the blackboard. “There is a puzzling part of the message. A picture—”

A well-drawn version of the interweaving curves. Saul stood in front of it, speaking into a hand-held microphone. “Understand,” he said, “we make no specific claims at this time. But we would like the help of the scientific community in unraveling what this might mean.” Some brief talk about the decoding followed.

Back to Cronkite. “Several astronomers CBS News asked today for opinions expressed skepticism. If Professor Shriffer proves correct, though, it could mean very big news, indeed,” Cronkite made his reassuring smile. “And that’s the way it is, April the twelfth—”

Gordon clicked Cronkite off. “Goddamn,” he said, still stunned.

“I thought it was very well done,” Penny said judiciously.

“Well done? He wasn’t supposed to use my name at all!”

“Why, don’t you want any credit?”

“Credit? Christ—!” Gordon slammed a fist against the gray plaster wall with a resounding thump. “He did it all wrong, don’t you see that? I had this sinking feeling when he told me, and sure enough—there’s my name, tied to his crackpot theory!”

“But it’s your measurement—”

“I told him, keep my name out”

“Well, it was Walter Cronkite who gave your name. Not Saul.”

“Who cares who said it? I’m in it with Saul, now.”

“Why didn’t they have you on TV?” Penny asked innocently, clearly unable to see what all the fuss was about. “It was just a lot of pictures of Saul.”

Gordon grimaced. “That’s his strong suit. Simplify science down to a few sentences, screw it up any way you want, pander to the lowest common denominator—but be sure Saul Shriffer’s name is in lights. Big, gaudy, neon lights. Crap. Just—”

“He sort of hogged the credit, didn’t he?”

Gordon looked at her, puzzled. “Credit… ?” He stopped pacing the room. He saw that she honestly thought his anger was over not getting his face on TV. “Good grief.” He felt suddenly hot and flushed. He began unbuttoning his blue broadcloth shirt and thought about what to do. No point in talking to Penny—she was light years away from understanding how scientists felt about something like this.

He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, puffing, and walking into the kitchen, where the telephone was.

Gordon began with, “Saul, I’m mad as hell.”

“Ah…” Gordon could picture Saul selecting just the right words. He was good at that, but it wasn’t going to do him any good this time. “Well, I know now you feel, Gordon, I really do, I saw the network show two hours ago and it was just as much a surprise to me as it was to you. The local Boston footage was clean, no mention of your name explicitly, the way you wanted it. I called them right away after I saw the Cronkite thing and they said it got all changed around up at the network level.”

“How did the network people know, Saul, if you didn’t—”

“Well, look, I had to tell the local people. For background info, y’know.”

“You said it wouldn’t get on.”

“I did what I could, Gordon. I was going to call you.”

“Why didn’t you? Why let me see it without—”

“I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind so much, after seeing how much time we got.” Saul’s voice changed tone. “It’s a big play, Gordon! People are going to sit up and take notice.”

Gordon said sourly, “Yeah, notice.”

“We’ll get some action on that picture. We’ll crack this thing.”

“It’ll crack us, more likely. Saul, I said I didn’t want to get dragged in. You said—”

“Don’t you see that was unrealistic?” Saul’s voice was calm and reasonable. “I humored you, sure, but it was bound to come out.”

“Not this way.”

“Believe me, this is how things work, Gordon. You weren’t getting anywhere before, were you? Admit it.”

He took a deep breath. “If anybody asks me, Saul, I’m going to say I don’t know where the signals are coming from. That’s the plain truth.”

“But that’s not the whole truth.”

“You are talking to me about the whole truth? You, Saul? You, who talked me into withholding the first message?”

“That was different. I wanted to clarify the issue—”

“The issue, shit! Listen, anybody asks me, I say I don’t agree with your interpretation.”

“You’ll release the first message?”

“I…” Gordon hesitated. “No, I don’t want to stir things up any more.” He wondered if Ramsey would continue to work on the experiments if he made the message public. Hell, for all he knew there really was some sort of national security element mixed up in this. Gordon knew he didn’t want any part of that. No, it was better to drop it.

“Gordon, I can understand your feelings.” The voice warmed. “All I ask is that you don’t hinder what I’m trying to do. I won’t get in your way, you don’t get in mine.”

“Well…” Gordon paused, his momentum blunted.

“And I truly am sorry about Cronkite and your name getting into it and all that. Okay?”

“I… okay,” Gordon muttered, not really knowing what he was agreeing with.