Timescape

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

GORDON WAS LATE FOR A FACULTY SENATE COMMITtee meeting, and hurrying, when Bernard Carroway intersected his trajectory. “Oh, Gaw-dun, I need to speak with you.” Something in Bernard’s tone made Gordon stop.

“I heard about this thing you have on with Shriffer. Saw a diddle about it on the late news—one of my students rang me to have a look.” Carroway clasped his hands behind his back, the gesture giving him a judicial appearance.

“Well… yes, I think Saul went a little overboard—”

“Glad to hear you say so!” Bernard was suddenly jovial. “I spotted it as a, well, Saul is given to excess in this sort of thing, you know.” He peered at Gordon for confirmation.

“Sometimes.”

“Couldn’t imagine anything more unlikely, myself—nuclear magnetic resonance experiments, he said? Bloody odd way to communicate.”

“Saul thinks part of it, ah, the message, is astronomical coordinates. You’ll remember when I came to you—”

“That’s the basis of it, then? Merely some coordinates?”

“Well, he did break down the pulses into that picture,” Gordon admitted lamely.

“Oh, that. Looks for all the world like a child’s scrawling to me.”

“No, there’s structure there. As for the content, we don’t—”

“I think you have to be careful in this, Gaw-dun. Understand, I like some of Shriffer’s work. But I and others in the astronomical community feel he’s, well, perhaps rather overstepped himself in this radio communication thing. And now this!—finding messages in nuclear resonance experiments! I think Shriffer’s quite exceeded the bounds.”

Bernard nodded seriously and peered down at his feet. Gordon wondered what to say. Bernard had a gravity about him that warded off direct contradiction. He carried his excess weight with an aggressive energy that seemed to dare anyone to make anything of it. He was short with the kind of barrel chest which, when he relaxed, would suddenly reveal itself to be merely an elevated stomach, held aloft with resolve. It sagged now as Gordon watched; Bernard had forgotten it in his concentration on the sins of Shriffer. His herringbone jacket bulged, the buttons strained. Gordon imagined he could hear Bernard’s belt creak with the sudden new pressure. This torture of his wardrobe was redeemed by the unconscious flush of pleasure which spread across Bernard’s serious face as his belly descended.

“It puts a black eye on the whole game, you know,” Bernard said abruptly, looking up. “Black eye.”

“I think until we get to the bottom—”

“The bottom is that Shriffer’s foxed you in with him, Gaw-dun. I’m sure none of it was your idea. I’m sorry our department has to be mixed in with his foolery. You’ll put paid to it, if you’re wise.”

This advice delivered, Bernard nodded and walked on.

Cooper glanced up as Gordon came into the laboratory. “Mornin’, how are you?” Cooper said.

Gordon reflected sourly that people routinely asked you how you were, as a formal greeting, when in fact they had not the slightest interest. “I feel like crap on a soda cracker,” Gordon muttered. Cooper frowned, puzzled. “You saw the TV last night?” Gordon asked.

Cooper pursed his lips. “Yes,” he said, as though he were giving a good deal away.

“I didn’t mean to let it get out of our hands like that. Shriffer took the ball and ran with it.”

“Well, maybe he scored a touchdown.”

“You think so?”

“No,” Cooper admitted. He leaned over and adjusted a setting on an oscilloscope, rather obviously having said all he wanted to. Gordon shrugged his shoulders as though they had weights attached. He would not try to puncture Cooper’s blithe goyische brass, so Well concealed beneath the cloak of unconcern.

“Any new data?” Gordon asked, cramming his fists into his pants pockets and pacing around the lab, inspecting, feeling a certain private pleasure at the thought that here, at least, he knew what was happening and what mattered.

“I’ve got some good resonance lines. I’m carrying on with the measurements we agreed I should make.”

“Ah, good.” See I’m only doing what we agreed I should. You won’t catch me with an unexpected result, nossir.

Gordon paced some more, checking the instruments. The nitrogen dewar popped with its brittle cold, transformers hummed, pumps chugged bovinely. Gordon read through Cooper’s lab notebook, looking for possible sources of error. He wrote out from memory the simple theoretical expressions which Cooper’s data should confirm. The numbers fell reassuringly close to the theoretical mark. Beside Cooper’s schoolboy neatness Gordon’s sprawling handwriting seemed a raffishly human intrusion on the neat, remorseless rectangularity of the gridded pages. Cooper worked in precise ballpoint; Gordon used a Parker fountain pen, even for quick calculations such as this. He preferred the elegant slick slide and sudden choking death of pens, and the touch of importance their broad blue lines gave to a page. One of the reasons he had switched from white shirts to blue was the doomed hope that ink stains on the left breast pocket would be easier to conceal.

Working this way, standing up amid the careless tangle of the ongoing experiment and scribbling in a notebook, calmed him. For a moment he was again back at Columbia, a son of Israel loyal to Newton’s cause. But then he had checked the last of Cooper’s numbers and there was nothing more to do. The moment passed. He sank back into the world.

“Do you have the summary I asked you to write up for your candidacy exam?” he asked Cooper.

“Oh, yeah. Almost done. I’ll get it to you tomorrow.”

“Good. Good.” He hesitated, not wanting to leave. “Say, ah—you haven’t got anything but conventional resonance curves? No—”

“Message?” Cooper smiled very slightly. “No, no message.”

Gordon nodded, looked around absently, and left.

He did not return to his office, but instead took as roundabout route to the Physical Sciences Library. It was on the ground floor of Building B and had a diffused, temporary air. Everything at UCLJ felt that way, compared to Columbia’s hallowed corridors, and now there was talk that even the campus name would change. La Jolla was being annexed by the jumble of San Diego. The city council spoke of the savings in fire and police protection, but to Gordon it seemed one more step in the steady homogenizing, the Losangelization of what had before been pleasant and charming distinctions. So UCLJ would become UCSD and something more than a mere name would be lost.

He spent an hour browsing through the new crop of physics journals and then looked up a few references relating to a back-burner idea he had let fall by the wayside. After a while he had no more real business and lunch was still an hour away. Somewhat reluctantly he returned to his office, not going up to the third floor to collect the morning mail but instead walking between the Physics and Chemistry buildings, passing under the architect’s wet dream of a connecting bridge. The graceful pattern of linked hexagons caught the eye, he had to give it that. Somehow, though, it looked uncomfortably like the scaffolding for some enormous insect’s burrow, a design pattern for a future wasp nest.

He was unsurprised to see his office door open, for he usually left it that way. The one distinction he had noted in the behavior pattern of humanists vs. scientists was the matter of doors: humanists closed them, discouraging casual encounters. Gordon wondered if this had a deep psychological significance, or, more likely, was meant by the humanists to conceal when they were on campus. As nearly as Gordon could tell, the answer was: seldom. They all seemed to work at home.

Isaac Lakin was standing in Gordon’s office, back to the door, studying the wasp’s scaffolding that loomed above. “Oh, Gordon,” he murmured, turning, “I’ve been looking for you.”

“I can imagine why.”

Lakin sat on the edge of Gordon’s desk; Gordon remained standing. “Oh?”

“The Shriffer thing.”

“Yes.” Lakin gazed up at the fluorescents and pursed his lips, as though carefully selecting the right words.

“It got out of hand,” Gordon said helpfully.

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“Shriffer said he would keep me and UCLJ out of the news. The sole aim was to circulate that drawing.”

“Well, it’s done more than that.”

“How so?”

“I’ve had a number of calls. So would you, if you stayed in your office.”

“Who from?”

“Colleagues. People working in the nuclear resonance community. They all want to know what’s going on. So, I might add, do I.”

“Well—” Gordon summarized the second message and how Shriffer got involved. “I’m afraid Saul took things further than they should properly have gone, but—”

“I would say so. Our contract monitor called, as well”

“So what?”

“So what? True, he does not have very much real power. But our colleagues do. They pass judgment.”

“Again, so what?”

Lakin shrugged. “You will have to deny Shriffer’s conclusions.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Because they are false.”

“I don’t know that.”

“You should not make statements you cannot prove to be true.”

“But to deny them is also untrue.”

“You consider his hypothesis likely?”

“No.” Gordon shuffled uneasily. He had hoped he would not have to say anything, one way or the other.

“Then refuse to go along with it.”

“I can’t deny we got that message. It came through loud and clear.”

Lakin raised his eyebrows with a European disdain, as though to say, How can I reason with a person such as this? In response, Gordon unconsciously hitched at his pants and hooked his thumbs into his belt at his hips, flexing his shoulders. Absurdly, he had a sudden image of Marlon Brando in the same pose, squinting at some thug who had just crossed him. Gordon blinked and tried to think of what to say next.

“You realize,” Lakin said carefully, “that talk of a message will—aside from making you appear a fool—cast doubt on the spontaneous resonance effect?”

“Maybe.”

“Some of my telephone calls were specifically about precisely this point.”

“Maybe.”

Lakin glanced at Gordon sharply. “I believe you should reflect upon it.”

Gordon murmured impishly, “To shine is better than to reflect.”

Lakin stiffened. “What are you—”

The telephone rang. Gordon seized it with relief. He answered the caller in monosyllables. “Fine. Three o’clock, then. My office number is 118.”

When he hung up he looked levelly at Lakin and said, “San Diego Union”

“A dreadful paper.”

“Granted. They want some background on the story.”

“You’re seeing them?”

“Sure.”

Lakin sighed. “What will you say?”

“I’ll tell them I don’t know where the hell the stuff if coming from.”

“Unwise. Unwise.”

After Lakin had left Gordon wondered at the sudden phrase that had forced its way into his mouth: To shine is better than to reflect. Where had he heard it before? Penny, probably; it sounded like some literary remark. But did he mean it? Was he after fame, like Shriffer? He was conditioned to accept a certain amount of guilt over something like that—that was the cliché, wasn’t it, Jews feel guilty, their mothers train them to? But guilt wasn’t it, no; his intuition told him that. His instinct was that something lurked in the message, it was real. He had been over this ground a hundred times and still he had to trust his own judgment, his own data. And if to Lakin the subject was foolish, if Gordon appeared to be a fraud—well, tough; so be it.

He hitched his thumbs into his belt and gazed out at the California insect engineering and felt good, pretty damn good.

After the San Diego Union reporter went away Gordon still felt confident, though with some effort. The reporter asked a lot of dumb questions, but that was par for the course. Gordon stressed the uncertainties; the Union wanted clear answers to cosmic questions, preferably in one quotable sentence. To Gordon the important point was how science was done, how answers were always provisional, always awaiting the outcome of future experiments. The Union expected adventure and excitement and more evidence of a university on its way to greatness. Across this gulf some information flowed, but not much.

He was sorting his mail, putting some into his briefcase for reading in the evening, when Ramsey came by.

After a few preliminaries—Ramsey seemed earnestly interested in the weather—he slipped a page from an envelope and said, “This the picture Shriffer showed last night?”

Gordon studied it. “Where did you get it?”

“From your student, Cooper.”

“And where did he get one?”

“He says, from Shriffer.”

“When?”

“A few weeks back. Shriffer came to him to check the dots and dashes, he says.”

“Um.” Gordon supposed he should have known Shriffer would check it. That was a reasonable precaution. “Okay, it’s a small point. What about it?”

“Well, I don’t think it makes any sense, but then I haven’t really had any time to—look, what I mean is, what’s this Shriffer guy doing?”

“He decoded a second message. He thinks it comes from a star called 99 Hercules that—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Point is, why’s he going on TV?”

“To figure out that picture.”

“He doesn’t know about the first message, the one I’m working on?”

“Sure he does.”

“Well, cripes—this stuff on the TV, it’s garbage, right?”

Gordon shrugged. “I’m an agnostic. I don’t know what it means, that’s what I just told a reporter.”

Ramsey looked worried. “You think this is the straight scoop, though? The stuff I’m working on is okay?”

“It’s okay.”

“Shriffer’s just an asshole?”

“I’m an agnostic,” Gordon said, suddenly tired. Everybody was asking him for the eternal, fixed Truth and he had none for sale.

“Geez. Some of the biochem is starting to make some sense, y’know? The li’l experiment I put one of my students on is panning out some, is how I know. Then this comes along…”

“Don’t worry about it. The Shriffer message may be pure bullshit for all I know. Look, I’ve been rushed and—” Gordon wiped his brow—“it’s just plain gotten away from me. Keep on with the experiments, okay?”

“Yeah, okay. Rushed why?”

“Shriffer. He thinks he’s decoded something and all of a sudden he’s on TV. Wasn’t my idea.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah. Makes it different.” Ramsey seemed mollified. Then his face clouded again. “What about the first message?”

“What about it?”

“You releasing it?”

“No. No plans to.”

“Good. Good.”

“You can have all the time to work on it you want.”

“Fine.” Ramsey held out his hand as though a deal had just been concluded. “I’ll be in touch.”

Gordon shook the hand solemnly.

The bit of playacting with Ramsey had bothered him at first, but he realized it was part of dealing with people: you had to adopt their voice, see things from their point of view, if you wanted to communicate at all. Ramsey saw all this as a game with the first message as privileged information, and Shriffer as simply an interloper. Well, for the purposes of Ramsey’s universe, so be it. At one time when he was younger Gordon would have been rudely cynical about striking a stance purely to convince someone. Now matters seemed different. He wasn’t lying to Ramsey. He wasn’t withholding information. He was merely tailoring the way he described the events. Adolescent cliches about truth and beauty and bird thou never wert were just crap, simplistic categories. When you had to get something done you talked the talk. That was the way it was. Ramsey would keep on with the experiments without fretting over unknowables, and, with luck, they might find out something.

He was walking away from the Physics building, toward Torrey Pines Road where his Chevy was parked, when a slight figure raised a hand in salutation. Gordon turned and recognized Maria Goeppert Mayer, the only woman in the department. She had suffered a stroke some time before and now appeared seldom, moving ghostlike through the hallways, one side partially impaired, her speech slurred. Her face sagged and she seemed tired, but in the eyes Gordon could see a dancing intelligence that let nothing slip by.

“Do you believe your… re… results?” she asked.

Gordon hesitated. Under her penetrating gaze he felt himself beneath the microscope of history; this woman had come out of Poland, passed through the war years, worked on the separation of uranium isotopes for the Manhattan Project at Columbia, done research with Fermi just before cancer caught him. She had come through all that and more: her husband, Joe, was a brilliant chemist and held a full professorship at Chicago, while she was denied a faculty position and had to be content with a research associate position. He wondered suddenly if she had been irritated at that while she did the work on the shell model of the nucleus that made her famous. Compared to what she faced, his troubles were nothing. He bit his lip.

“Yes. Yes, I think so. Something… something is trying to reach us. I don’t know what.”

She nodded. There was a serene confidence in the way she did it, despite her numbed side, that clutched at something in Gordon. He blinked in sunset’s lancing light, and the glow turned to warm water in his eyes. “Good. Good,” she murmured with a halting tongue, and moved away, still smiling at him.

He arrived home just after Penny, and found her changing clothes. He dumped his briefcase, carrying the cares of the day, into a corner. “Where to?” he asked.

“Surf’s up.”

“Christ, it’s getting dark.”

“Waves don’t know that.”

He sagged against the wall. Her energy staggered him. This was the facet of California he found hardest: the sheer physicality of it, the momentum.

“Come with me,” she said, pulling on a French bikini brief and a T-shirt. “I’ll show you how. You can body surf.”

“Uh,” he said, not wanting to mention that he had looked forward to a glass of white wine and the evening news. After all, he thought—and suddenly not quite liking the thought—there might be a followup on the Shriffer story.

“Come on!”

At Windansea Beach he watched her carve a path down the slope of a descending wave and wondered at it: a frail girl, mastering a blunt board and harnessing the blind momentum of the ocean, suspended in air as though by some miracle of Newtonian dynamics. It seemed a liquid mystery, and yet he felt he should be unsurprised; it was, after all, classical dynamics. The gang from around the pump house was out in full force, riding their boards as they awaited the perfect oncoming toppling ton of water, brown bodies deft on the white boards. Gordon sweated through the remorseless routine of the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises, assuring himself that this was just as good as the obvious pleasure the surfers took in their splitting of the waves. The required situps and pushups done, he ran over the swaths of sand, puffing to himself and in a muzzy way trying to unscramble the events of the day. They refused his simple tug: the day would not break down into simple paradigm. He halted, gasping in the salt air, eyebrows dark and beaded with sweat. Penny walked forward on her board, perched in the thick air, and waved to him. Behind her the ocean cupped itself upright and caught her board in a smooth hand, tilting it forward. She teetered, wobbled, arms fanned the air: she fell. The soapy churn engulfed her. The slick white board tumbled forward, end over end, driven by momentum’s grasp. Penny’s head appeared, hair plastered like a cap to her head, blinking, teeth white and bared. She laughed.

As they dressed he said, “What’s for supper?”

“Whatever you want.”

“Artichoke salad, then pheasant, then a brandy trifle.”

“I hope you can make all that.”

“Okay, what do you want?”

“I’m going out. I’m not hungry.”

“Huh?” A dull dawning of surprise. He was hungry.

“I’m going to a meeting.”

“What for?”

“A meeting. A rally, I guess.”

“For what?” he persisted.

“For Goldwater.”

“What?”

“You may have heard of him. He’s running for President.”

“You’re kidding.” He stopped, foot in midair, halfway into his jockey shorts. Then, realizing how comical he must look, he stepped in and pulled them up. “He’s a simple-minded—”

“Babbitt?”

No, Sinclair Lewis wouldn’t have occurred to him. “Just leave it at simple-minded.”

“Ever read The Conscience of a Conservative? He has a lot of things to say in there.”

“No, I didn’t. But look, when you have Kennedy, with the test ban treaty and some really new ideas in foreign policy, the Alliance for Progress—”

“Plus the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, that pig-eyed little brother of his—”

“Oh, come on. Goldwater is just a pawn of big business.”

“He’ll stand up to the communists.”

Gordon sat down on their bed. “You don’t believe that stuff, do you?”

Penny wrinkled her nose, a gesture Gordon knew meant her mind was set. “Who sent our men into South Vietnam? What about what happened to Cliff and Bernie?”

“If Goldwater gets in there’ll be a million Cliffs and Bernies over there.”

“Goldwater will win over there, not just fool around.”

“Penny, the thing to do over there is cut our losses. Why support a dictator like Diem?”

“All I know is, friends of mine are getting killed.”

“And Big Barry will change all that.”

“Sure. I think he’s solid. He’ll stop socialism in our country.”

Gordon lay back on the bed, spouting a resigned whoosh of disbelief. “Penny, I know you think I’m some sort of New York communist, but I fail to see—”

“I’m late already. Linda invited me to this cocktail party for Goldwater, and I’m going. You want to go?”

“Good God, no.”

“Okay, I’m going.”

“You’re a literature student who’s for Goldwater? Come on”

“I know I don’t fit your stereotypes, but that’s your problem, Gordon.”

“Jeezus.”

“I’ll be back in a few hours.” She combed back her hair and checked her pleated skirt and walked out of the bedroom, stiff and energetic. Gordon lay on the bed watching her leave, unable to tell whether she was serious or not. She slammed the front door so hard it rattled, and he decided that she was.

It was an unlikely match from the start. They had met at a wine and chips party in a beach cottage on Prospect Street, a hundred yards from the La Jolla Art Museum. (The first time Gordon went to the Museum he hadn’t noticed the sign and assumed it was simply another gallery, somewhat better than most; to call it and the Met both museums seemed a deliberate joke.) His first impression was of her assembled order: neat teeth; scrupulously clear skin; effortless hair. A contrast with the thin, conflicted women of New York he had seen, “encountered”—a favorite word, then—and finally been daunted by. Penny seemed luminous and open, capable of genuinely breezy talk, uncluttered with the delivered opinions of The New York Times or the latest graduate seminar on What Is Important. In a flowered cocktail dress with a square neckline, the straight lines mitigated by a curving string of pearls, her glowing tan emitted warm yellow radiations that seeped through him in the wan light, life from a distant star. He was well into a bottle of some rotgut red by that time and probably overestimated the magic of the occasion, but she did seem to loom in the shadowed babble of the room. In better lit circumstances they might not have hit it off. This time, though, she was quick and artful and unlike any woman he had ever met before. Her flat California vowels were a relief from the congested accents of the east, and her sentences rolled out with an easy perfection he found entrancing. Here was the real thing: a naturalness, a womanly fervor, a clarity of vision. And anyway, she had ample, athletic thighs that moved under the silky dress as though her whole body were constrained by the cloth, capable of joyful escape. He didn’t know much about women—Columbia’s notorious deficiency—and as he knocked back more wine and made more conversation he wondered at himself, at her, at what was happening. It was uncomfortably like a cherished fantasy. When they left together, climbed into a Volkswagen and stuttered away from the still-buzzing party, his breath quickened at the implications—which promptly came true. From there the times spent together, the restaurants mutually enjoyed, the records and books rediscovered, seemed inevitable. This was the canonical It. The one thing he had always known about women was that there had to be magic, and now here it was, unannounced, even rather shy. He seized it.

And now in the metaphorical morning after, she had friends named Cliff and parents in Oakland and a liking for Goldwater. All right, he thought, so the details were not perfect. But maybe, in a sense, that was part of the magic, too.