Timescape

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

GORDON HAD BREAKFAST AT HARRY’S COFFEE SHOP on Girard, trying to read over his lecture notes and invent some problems for a homework set. It was difficult to work. The clatter of dishes kept intruding and a tinny radio played Kingston Trio songs, which he disliked. The only recent item in pop music he could tolerate was “Dominique,” an odd hit recorded by an angel-voiced Belgian nun. He was not in the mood for concentration on things academic, anyway. The San Diego Union writeup of Saul’s PR blitz had been worse than he’d expected, sensational beyond the bounds of reason. Several people in the department had tut-tutted him about it.

He mulled this over as he drove up Torrey Pines, without reaching any conclusion. He was distracted by a weaving Cadillac with its headlights burning on high. The driver was the typical fortyish man wearing a porkpie hat and a dazed expression. Back in the late ‘50s, he remembered, the National Safety Council had made a big thing of that. On one of the national holidays they publicized the practice of driving with headlights on during the day, to remind everyone to drive safely. Somehow the idea caught on with the slow-is-safe drivers and now, years later, you would still see them meandering through traffic, certain that their slowness bestowed invulnerability, lights burning uselessly There was something about such reflex stupidity that never failed to irritate him.

Cooper was in the lab already. Showing more industry as his candidacy exam approaches, Gordon thought, but then felt guilty for being cynical. Cooper did seem genuinely more interested now, quite possibly because the whole message riddle had been elevated out of his thesis.

“Trying out the new samples?” Gordon asked with a friendliness fueled by the residue of guilt.

“Yeah. Getting nice stuff. Looks to me like the added indium impurities did the trick.”

Gordon nodded. He had been developing a method of doping the samples to achieve the right concentration of impurities and this was the first confirmation that several months of effort were going to pan out. “No messages?”

“No messages,” Cooper said with obvious relief.

A voice from the doorway began, “Say, uh, I was told…”

“Yes?” Gordon said, turning. The man was dressed in droopy slacks and an Eisenhower jacket. He looked to be over fifty and his face was deeply tanned, as though he worked out of doors.

“You Perfesser Bernstein?”

“Yes.” Gordon was tempted to add one of his father’s old jokes, “Yes, I have that honor,” but the man’s earnest expression told him it wouldn’t go over.

“I, I’m Jacob Edwards, from San Diego? I’ve done some work I think you might be interested in?” He turned every sentence into a question.

“What kind of work?”

“Well, your experiments and the message and all? Say, is this where you get the signals?”

“Ah, yes.”

Edwards ambled into the laboratory, touching some of the equipment wonderingly. “Impressive. Real impressive.” He studied some of the new samples laid out on the working counter.

“Hey,” Cooper said, looking up from the x-y recorder. “Hey, those samples are coated with—shit!”

“Oh, that’s okay, my hands were dirty anyway. You fellas got a lot of fine equipment in here? How you pay for it all?”

“We have a grant from—but look, Mr. Edwards, what can I do for you?”

“Well, I solved your problem, you know? I have, yeah.” Edwards ignored Cooper’s glare.

“How, Mr. Edwards?”

“The secret,” he said, looking secretive, “is magnetism.”

“Oh.”

“Our sun’s magnetism, that’s what they’re after?”

“Who?” Gordon began to rummage through his mind for some way to get Edwards away from the equipment.

“The people who’re sending you those letters? They’re coming here to steal our magnetism. It’s all that keeps the Earth going around the sun—that’s what I’ve proved.”

“Look, I don’t think magnetism has anything to do—”

“Your experiment here—” he patted the large field coils—“uses magnets, doesn’t it?”

Gordon saw no reason to deny that. Before he could say anything Edwards went on, “They were drawn to your magnetism, Perfesser Bernstein. They’re exploring for more magnetism and now that they’ve found yours, they’re gong to come and get it.”

“I see.”

“And they’re going to take the sun’s magnetism, too.” He waved his hands and stared off at the ceiling, as though confronting a vision. “All of it. We’ll fall into the sun?”

“I don’t think—”

“I can prove all this, you know,” the man said calmly in an I’m-being-perfectly-reasonable tone. “I stand before you as the man who has cracked—cracked—the unified field riddle. You know? Where all the particles come from, and where these messages come from? I’ve done it?”

“Jee-zus,” Cooper said sourly.

Edwards turned on him. “Whacha mean by that, boy?”

Cooper shot back, “Tell me, are they coming in flying saucers?”

Edwards’ face clouded. “Who tole you that?”

“Just a guess,” Cooper said mildly.

“You got somethin’ you’re not tellin’ the newspapers?”

“No,” Gordon cut in. “No, we don’t.”

Edwards poked a finger at Cooper. “Then why’d he say—Ah!” He froze, looking at Cooper. “You’re not gonna tell the newspapers, are you?”

“There is nothing—”

“Not gonna tell about the magnetism at all, are you?”

“We don’t—”

“Well, you’re not keeping it for yourself! The unified magnetism theory is mine and you, you educated—” he struggled for the word he wanted, gave up and went on—“In your universities, aren’t gonna keep me from—”

“There is no—”

“—from goin’ to the newspapers and tellin’ my side of it. I’ve had some education, too, y’know, an’—”

“Where did you study?” Cooper said sarcastically. “The Close Cover Before Striking Institute?”

“You—” Edwards seemed suddenly congested with words, so many words he could not get them out one at a time. “You—”

Cooper stood up casually, looking muscular and on guard. “Come on, fella. Move it.”

“What?”

“Out.”

“You can’t have my ideas!”

“We don’t want them,” Gordon said.

“Wait’ll you see it in the newspapers. Just you wait.”

“Out.” Cooper said.

“You won’t get a peep at my magnetism motor, either. I was going to show you—”

Gordon put his hands on his hips and walked toward the man, boxing him in with Cooper on one side and the only escape leading to the laboratory doorway. Edwards backed away, still talking. He glared at them and struggled for a last phrase to hurl, but his imagination failed him. Edwards turned, grumbling, and shouldered his way into the corridor outside.

Gordon and Cooper looked at each other. “One of the laws of nature,” Gordon said, “is that half the people have got to be below average.”

“For a Gaussian distribution, yeah,” Cooper said. “Sad, though.” He shook his head and smiled. Then he went back to work.

Edwards was the first, but not the last. They turned up at a steady rate, once the San Diego Union story was picked up by other newspapers. Some drove in from Fresno and Eugene, intent on unraveling the riddle of the messages, each sure he knew the answer before he saw the evidence. Some brought manuscripts they had written on their ideas about the universe in general, or a particular scientific theory—Einstein was a favorite, and refuting him the common theme—or, occasionally, on Gordon’s experiments. The notion of writing a supposedly learned treatise, using only a vague newspaper article as the sole source, bemused Gordon. Some of the visitors had even published their theses, using the private presses beloved of amateurs. They would present them to him, lovingly handing over bound bundles with lurid covers. Inside, a jumble of terms elbowed each other for room in sentences that led nowhere. Equations appeared by sleight of hand, festooned with new symbols like fresh Christmas tree decorations. The theories, when Gordon took the time to listen, would begin and end in midair; they had no connection with anything else known in physics, and always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable. Most of the cranks seemed to think constructing a new theory involved only the invention of new terms. Along with “energy,” “field,” “neutrino,” and other common terms would appear “macron,” “superon,” and “fluxforce”—all undefined, all surrounded with the magic aura of the Believer.

Gordon came to recognize them easily. They would come to his office or laboratory, or call him at home, and within a minute he could tell them from ordinary folk. The cranks always had certain buzz words that appeared early on. They would claim to have solved everything—to have wrapped up all known problems in one grand synthesis. “Unified theory” was a dead giveaway. Another was the sudden, unexplained appearance of the Believer Words such as “superon.” At first Gordon would laugh when this happened, joshing the crank with a casual manner, sometimes making a joke. But a third hallmark of the crank was his humorlessness. They never laughed, never backed down from their ramparts. Indeed, open display of ridicule would bring out the worst in them. They were uniformly sure that every working scientist was out to steal their ideas. Several warned him that they had already applied for a patent. (The fact that you can patent an invention but not an idea had passed them by.) At this point Gordon would try to contrive a graceful exit from the conversation; on the telephone this was easy; he just hung up. Cranks in person were not so simple. Resistance to their groundbreaking ideas inevitably led to open threats that they would—here there came the grim look, the reluctant decision that they must use the final, ultimate weapon—go immediately to the newspapers. Somehow, to them, the press was always the judge of things scientific. Since Gordon had been elevated to their attention by the San Diego Union, he would of course fear deeply any attack on his position in the same hallowed pages.

Finally, Gordon developed defenses. On the telephone he was quick to hang up—so quick that he cut off his own mother once, when he did not recognize her voice and could not make out anything intelligible over the transcontinental static. Crank manuscripts and letters were equally easy He wrote a note saying that while the person’s ideas were “interesting” (a suitably non-judgmental term), they were beyond his competence, so he was unable to comment on them. This worked; they never replied. On-the-spot cranks were the worst. He learned to be abrupt, even rude. This got rid of most of them. The harder, persistent sort—such as Edwards—Gordon learned to derail, to gently deflect onto other matters. Then he would edge them toward the door, murmuring reassuring phrases—but never a promise to read a manuscript, attend a lecture, or vouch for a theory. That way lay further involvement and more wasted time. He would edge them toward the door and they would go—grudgingly, sometimes, but they would go.

A side effect of this crank traffic came to light in casual remarks from other members of the department. They noted the cranks with interest at first. Amusement followed, and Gordon provided them with anecdotes of strange theories and even stranger behavior. But in time the mood changed. Other faculty disliked having the department known for its garbled image in the San Diego Union. They stopped asking him, at the afternoon coffee break, what new crank had come by. Gordon noticed the change.