Timescape

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE SAN DIEGO AREA WAS GROWING AND SPREADING. Rather than pattern itself on the jumble of Los Angeles, the younger city to the south chose to encourage white-collar employers, “clean” industries, and think tanks. The largest such tank in the area was General Atomic, scarcely a mile from the fledgling University. Quite considerable fish were to be seen swimming in its waters, puzzling at government-sponsored problems. Noted names from Berkeley and Caltech spent pleasant months scribbling on blackboards while outside, the General Atomic squirrels and rabbits lazily foraged for their handouts. The animals were part of a psychologist’s deliberate plan to evoke rest, quiet, and deep thought; the resemblance to a Disney film may have been accidental. The architect’s remorselessly circular motif for the central General Atomic offices, with the eagerly cooperative library at its center, had a similar aim. The ringed roads and buildings recalled Oriental notions of completeness, of serenity, of rest. The curved hallways would increase contact between researchers. In fact, though, the inescapable geometry meant that no one could see further than thirty feet along the curving corridors. This tended to prevent the accidental meetings as scientists came and went; they passed out of view before they could be noticed. To go home or to the library meant moving radially, and thus seeing nobody. As Freeman Dyson said that summer, “The mean interaction distance around here is no bigger than a soccer goal.” Yet often it was enough; these were exciting times. Only six months before, Mariner II had surveyed Venus close up for the first time. Gell-Mann and others were plumbing new depths in particle theory. In April, J. Robert Oppenheimer was named winner of the Atomic Energy Commission’s 1963 Fermi award. Oppenheimer had been, in the eyes of many scientists, the public whipping boy of the McCarthy era; he had been declared a security risk in 1954. Now at last the government seemed to be serving some penance for its stupidity. Hard feelings against Edward Teller, who had not spoken out strongly for Oppenheimer, in turn began to wane.

The feeling of opening, of fresh starts, was on the political scene already a cliché. The Kennedy ambience was a canon of media hype. Vaughn Meader’s “The First Family” album, which mocked the Kennedy clan, sold briskly; the public sensed that the derision was all in good fun. Scientists were a more skeptical lot, however, mostly liberal or radical, and bothered by Bobby Kennedy’s generally perceived ruthlessness and neglect of the legal niceties of wiretapping. But the rise of support for scientific research was now coming to seem like a permanent feature, beginning with a sudden rush after Sputnik and rising linearly. Everyone knew it would plateau out, but not soon; there was much to be done, and few to do it.

Freeman Dyson came to California on leave from Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, to work on the Orion project. Dyson had an immense reputation as a theoretical physicist and thus was invited to give one of the last spring Colloquia in the UCLJ Physics Department. Gordon was pleased. He was to give the very last Colloquium of the year, and to have Dyson speak beforehand about some speculative ideas might defuse some of the reaction to Gordon.

Dyson was slim and humorous, moving gracefully before the blackboard as though in a light trance, thinking hard about what he wanted to say and bending each sentence to strike a precise point. He had been very careful earlier to correct George Feher when he was referred to as “Doctor.” Dyson had never finished his doctorate and now seemed slightly proud of it, with the Englishman’s pride at being, at least in the formal sense, an amateur. But there was nothing amateurish about Dyson’s Colloquium. His slides were neat, with clear graphics, some in color. They had the professional aerospace finish that to Gordon underlined the pleasant perks of prosperity; in his undergraduate days at Columbia, rough sketches and hand-lettered slides were universal.

Dyson described his years of work on Project Orion, a plan to propel huge spacecraft by exploding nuclear bombs behind them. The blast would strike a “pusher plate,” which would transfer the muted kick through shock absorbers to the ship itself. The idea at first seemed like a Rube Goldberg design, but as Dyson spoke it became plausible. The only way to ferry truly large payloads around the solar system was through nuclear drives of some kind. Orion was basically simple and used what we were already good at: making efficient bombs. Why not use man’s destructive capability for something useful? Dyson thought that a strong effort would not simply put men on the moon by 1970—Kennedy’s goal—but beyond, all the way to Mars. The principles involved had been tried in small-scale experiments and they worked. The problem, of course, was the first stage: lifting the craft from the earth’s surface on a stuttering trail of nuclear blasts.

“Won’t you plaster us with radioactive debris?” a voice from the Colloquium audience called.

Dyson pursed his lips. He was a compact man and his sharp features seemed to pin the problem like a butterfly. “Much less so than the atmospheric tests we and the Soviet Union are now conducting. We calculate Orion would add no more than one percent to the level of radiation that politics—” he pronounced the word carefully—“already sets for us.”

At this point Dyson became wistful, as though he could sense Orion slipping from him. The newspapers brought daily reports of agreements on the Nuclear Test Ban; Washington rumor said it would be signed within months. If so, even Orion’s small dose of radioactives would be ruled out. Toward the end of the hour, after the equations and graphs, there came a bittersweet quality. History would pass Orion by. It might someday fly above the atmosphere, once men had a safe way to get it into orbit with chemical rockets. But even then, much of the debris would eventually find its way down into the air. Maybe there was no completely safe way to harness our gift for making bombs. Maybe there were no shortcuts to the planets.

The applause which greeted Dyson’s somber conclusion was prolonged. He bowed tentatively toward his audience, smiling with sad eyes.

Gordon gave the last Colloquium of the year. The audience was even larger than Dyson’s of the week before, and noisier. Gordon opened with details of the experiment, history of the field, slides of the normal resonance lines. He had compiled all Cooper’s conventional results to date, and showed how these confirmed the usual theory. It was a satisfactory but relatively unexciting discussion. Gordon had considered leaving matters at that—no reference to the messages, no risks. But something made him cut short the parade of slides. He murmured, “However, there are some unusual features in the noise observed in our work”—and he was off, describing the interruptions of Cooper’s resonance curves, their suspicion that a pattern lay underneath, then the first decoding. Gordon used the viewgraph projector, sliding the transparent sheets into view as he spoke, his sentences coming quicker now, the words more clipped, a certain momentum coming into his voice. He showed the breakdown of the first message. He discussed the chances that such a message could be a fluke, an accident. From the crowded room there arose a sustained murmur. He described their efforts to track down a local source for the noise, their failure, and then the second message. Gordon made no mention of Saul and the 29-by-53 grid; he simply displayed the data. The RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2 chart filled an entire viewgraph. Only then did Gordon mention “spontaneous resonance,” giving Isaac Lakin full credit for the term and the idea. He kept his face blank and his voice flat and calm as he described “spontaneous resonance,” gave the statistical probability of such an effect arising from random noise, and left the rows of RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2 on the viewgraph as mute testimony. In dry, precise tones he told of their precautions against outside signals, of the waxing and waning of the “spontaneous resonance”—now he used the term archly, pausing before and after the words as if to put verbal quotation marks around them, smiling very slightly—and he paced back and forth before the blackboards, trying to remember the measured way Dyson had done it, head tilted down.

The voice came out of the audience. Before the first sentence was finished, heads turned to see the speaker. It was Freeman Dyson. “You realize, I suppose, that Saul Shriffer has made much of this? Of 99 Hercules?”

“Ah, yes,” Gordon said, stunned. He had not seen Dyson in the crowd. “I, I did not authorize him to…”

“And that no one at 99 Hercules could possibly be responding to our commercial radio stations yet? It is too far away.”

“Well, yes.”

“So if this is a message from there, they must be using communication faster than light?”

The auditorium was silent. “Yes.” Gordon hesitated. Should he back up Saul’s idea? Or stand pat?

Dyson shook his head. “I spoke last week about a dream. It is good to dream—but be sure to wake up.”

A wave of laughter came down from the crowd and broke over Gordon. He stepped backward two paces without thinking. Dyson himself looked surprised at the reaction, and then smiled down from his position halfway up the bowl-shaped auditorium, his face softening as he looked at Gordon, as though to blunt the edge of his remark. Around Dyson others were slapping their knees and rocking back and forth in their seats, as though something had unleashed a tension in them and now, with a sign from Dyson, they were sure of how to react.

“I don’t propose…” Gordon began, but was drowned out by the continuing laughter. “I don’t…” He noticed Isaac Lakin standing, a few seats from the front and to the left. Eyes in the audience turned from Gordon to Lakin. The laughter died.

“I would like to make a statement,” Lakin said, voice booming. “I invented the idea of spontaneous resonance to explain unusual data. I did so completely honestly. I think there is something happening in these experiments. But this message thing—” he waved a hand in dismissal. “No. No. It is nonsense. I now disclaim any association with it. I do not want my name linked with such, such claims. Let Bernstein and Shriffer make what they want—I do not cooperate.”

Lakin sat down decisively. There was applause.

“I don’t propose to decide what this means,” Gordon began. His voice was thin and it was hard getting the words out. He peered at Dyson. Someone was whispering to Dyson and smiling broadly. Lakin, Gordon noticed, was sitting with arms folded across his chest, glaring down at the RA and DEC. Gordon spun and looked at the coordinates looming above him, large and flat and remorseless.

“But I think it’s there.” He turned back to the crowd. “I know it sounds funny, but…” The buzzing in the audience kept on. He coughed, and could not seem to summon up the booming confidence that Lakin had used. The crowd noise got louder.

“Ah, Gordon…” He was surprised to find the Department Chairman at his elbow. Professor Glyer held up a palm toward the audience and the murmuring died. “We have already run over our allotted time, and another lecture is scheduled to begin here. Further, ah, further questions can be asked at the coffee to follow, served upstairs in the foyer.” The chairman led a muted ritual applause. It was all but drowned out in a babble of voices as the crowd spilled out of the room. Someone passed near Gordon, saying to his companion, “Well, maybe Cronkite believes it, but…” and the companion laughed. Gordon stood with his back to the blackboard, watching them leave. Nobody came up to ask a question. Around Lakin a knot of people buzzed. Dyson appeared at Gordon’s side. “Sorry they took it that way,” he said. “I didn’t mean it as…”

“I know,” Gordon murmured. “I know.”

“It simply seems so damned unlikely…”

“Shriffer thinks…” Gordon began, but decided to let the subject alone. “What did you think of the rest of the message?”

“Well, frankly, I don’t believe there is a message. It makes no sense.”

Gordon nodded.

“Uh, the press coverage hasn’t helped you any, you realize.”

Gordon nodded.

“Well, uh, some coffee then?” Dyson bowed goodbye uneasily and moved away with the exiting crowd. The Colloquium had trickled away to the coffee and cookies upstairs and Gordon felt the tension drain out of him, to be replaced by the familiar day-end numbness. As he collected his viewgraphs his hands shook. I should get more exercise, he thought. I’m out of shape. Abruptly he decided to skip the coffee hour. The hell with them. The hell with the whole damned bunch.