Timescape

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

DURING THE SUMMER THE RHYTHM OF THEIR DAYS changed. Penny began to sleep later and Gordon found himself waking before her. He resolved that he would stick to his Canadian Air Force exercise program religiously, and the best time to do it was in the early hours, on the deserted stretches of Windansea Beach. He never liked doing them at home, particularly if Penny was there. He liked going down to the white sands which had been cleaned by the night tides and working his way through the exercises as the sunlight brimmed above Mount Soledad to the east. Then he would run as far as possible along the beach. Each cove was a scooped-out world of its own, the shadows shortening as the sun rose. His sheen of sweat cooled in the blue shadows and the thick ocean air had a tangible watery weight as he sucked it in, puffing, legs setting a thump thump thump that came up through the bones, a curious sound in this air, like chunks of wood falling on an oak floor. He had run like this when he was a kid, on the scruffy beaches of New Jersey. His Uncle Herb took him there often, just after his father started with the sickness. When Jersey crowded in summertime, Uncle Herb took him for rides in a yellow Studebaker, out to Long Island. His mother had always spoken of the people who lived out there, of People Who Actually Owned Beach Front Property, as though they were another race. The first time Uncle Herb took him, Gordon asked if they were going to visit relatives, hoping he had some thread of connection with those mythical folk. Uncle Herb laughed in his quick, barking, not altogether friendly way, and wheezed, “Yeah, I’m going to visit a Mister Gatsby, doncha know,” and slapped the side of the big yellow car, making a solid metallic thump. Gordon had sat with his arm out the window for the whole trip, the summer breeze of their passage caressing the black hair on his arm. The hair was more apparent that summer; Gordon compared his to Uncle Herb’s and found that he had made remarkable progress in just a year. It took six more years before he understood the enigmatic remark about Gatsby. By the time he had read the book—ignoring the proffered Malamud from his mother—he could no longer remember much about the big houses on Long Island, or whether any of them had a green light on the end of a dock, or any of the other stuff. The beaches there, he remembered, were thin and stony, a bleak margin begrudged by the big inland estates. There wasn’t much to do. Children built sand castles which their parents periodically approved, peering into the yellow-blue sun haze over the tops of their paperback books. He remembered thinking that if Long Island was typical, goyische life was dull. By contrast, Uncle Herb took him to some actual prizefights that summer, fights as big and real as he’d ever thought life could be. Thump thump his legs pounded on, and before him he saw again the white square of the ring, the two figures dancing and punching, a head jerking back when hit, the ref waltzing around the men, shouts and whistles and a hot, close, salty smell from the liquid crowd. “Didja see that guy Alberts in the fifth round,” Uncle Herb said at the intermission, “feet like sandbags? Like a guy looking for a collar button he dropped. Sheesh!” And after the decision: “Those refs! Giving him two rounds, using what for eyes? I wouldn’t want to go on hunting trips with them” Thump thump thump and the salty smell of the crowd went away and Gordon was running into a rising sun, the tang in his nostrils was a sea breeze thousands of miles from Long Island and he was throwing his fists out as he ran, uppercuts and cross punches and jabs with their own rhythm, his feet connected to his fists, panting hard, a face muddy and formless in front of him, now resolving into Lakin as Gordon wondered at it the same instant that he gave it two of his best, a fake and a belly punch and then the jab, fast and easy, then some more as he thought about Lakin and began to self-consciously erase the swimming face, but held it for three quick jabs, his knuckles sailing through the milky image and the head rocking back one, two, three times thump thump thump yeah Uncle Herb taking him places that whole long summer while his father was hanging on, keeping the boy’s mind occupied—Gordon threw two more punches at the air, aiming at he didn’t know what—mind filled yeah with fights and beaches and books while his father said nothing, smiled when you talked to him, never complained, just crawled away from everyone to die, the way they did it in the Bernstein family, just quietly, no fuss, nobody beating the drum for you, not for a Bernstein thump thump thump the beach sand now warming under his feet, sweat trickling into his eyes, stinging, blurring the morning, his throat raw. Jesus, he had run a long way. The cliffs were high here. He had slogged past Scripps pier and down to Black’s Beach, a long deserted stretch below the Torrey Pines Park. He was running in shadow now and as he brushed the sweat from his eyes he suddenly saw that he was about to stumble on something. He leaped, thinking it was a sleeping dog, ran on by reflex and looked back. A couple. Legs akimbo. Woman’s heels pointed at the sky. The whites of four eyes. Jesus he thought, but somehow it didn’t disturb him that much. The idea was logical: lonely beach, horny couple, beautiful sunrise, salty smell. But it did mean he had to run even farther. Give them time to finish their thump thump thump. Certainly it was a better vision to end a run with than Lakin’s creamy face, Gordon thought muzzily. Lakin was a problem he couldn’t solve and maybe, he saw, that was why he was running so far, wearing himself out so a real fist wouldn’t smack into a real face. Maybe, yeah, and maybe not. He had Uncle Herb’s contempt for too much analysis. One way to be a potzer was to worry about things like that too much, yeah. Gordon smiled and licked his lips and threw two more punches, slicing the forgiving air.

Saul Shriffer called in mid-July. He had finished up the observations of 99 Hercules, using the Green Bank radio telescope. Results were negative. No coherent signal rose up out of the interstellar sputter. Gordon suggested using higher frequencies and narrower bandwidths. Saul said he had tried some. Without more to show for their efforts, though, he wasn’t going to be able to get any more time on the instrument. Conventional research projects had precedence. They talked for a few minutes about alternatives, but there weren’t any. The Cavendish group had turned down Saul’s request for telescope time. Saul said a few reassuring things, and Gordon mechanically agreed. When Saul hung up Gordon felt an unexpected letdown. He saw that, without admitting it to himself, he had been pinning hope on the radio-listening idea. That evening, when he met Penny for dinner at Buzzy’s, he did not mention the call. The next day he wrote Saul a letter asking that he not publish any summary of the radio search. Let’s wait until something positive comes along, he argued. But more than that, Gordon wanted to keep quiet. Maybe it would all go away. Maybe it would be forgotten.

When Penny went board surfing at Scripps Beach, Gordon sat on the sand and watched. He had been doing a lot of that recently—sitting, thinking, letting others play out the summer. He liked running on the beach and knew he should try riding the waves, now that he had someone to teach him, but something held him back. He watched the La Jolla ladies work on their expensive tans, and came to know the types: People who worked outdoors were pale behind the knees, whereas beach loungers were a uniform chocolate, a consummation carefully arrived at.

Penny came out of the tumbling waters, board perched on a hip, straggly hair dripping. She sagged down beside him, wrung out her hair, flicked a glance at his set expression. “Okay,” she said finally, “time to ‘fess up.”

“Fess who?”

“Fess Parker. Gordon, come on. You’re doing your zombie imitation.”

Gordon had always prided himself on getting right to the point; now he found himself rummaging for something to say. “Y’know… I’ve been looking through the journals in the library. Astronomy journals, I mean. Mercury, Scientific American, Science News. Most of them are flat out ignoring Saul’s PR work. Even if they mention it, they don’t reproduce the picture. And not a one gave the Hercules coordinates.”

“Publish them yourself.”

Gordon shook his head. “Won’t do any good.”

“When did you start feeling so inadequate?”

“At ten,” Gordon said, hoping for some way to defleet this conversation, “when I began to suspect I wasn’t Mozart.”

“Uh huh.”

“I was that American myth, the 98-pound weakling. Those Charles Atlas ads, remember. When I went to the beach, bullies didn’t kick sand in my face—they’d kick me in the face. Eliminate the middle man.”

“Uh huh.” She studied him, face compressed. “You know that was the first thing you’ve told me about the Saul business in, what, a month?”

He shrugged.

“You never tell me anything anymore.”

“I don’t want to get you so involved that people will ask you about it. So you’ll have to defend me to friends.” He paused. “Or deal with cranks.”

“Gordon, I’d rather know what’s going on. Really. If I’m to talk to UCLJ people I can’t very well gloss over it.”

He shrugged again. “Big deal. I might be leaving UCLJ anyway.”

“What?”

So he told her about not getting the Merit Increase. “Look,” he concluded, “being appointed an Assistant Professor is always risky. You may have to move on if things don’t work out. I outlined all that to you. We talked it over.”

“Well, sure, eventually…” She stared off toward La Jolla Point, face blank. “I mean, in the long run, if you didn’t publish…”

“I’ve published,” he murmured in a half-breath, defensively.

“Then why?”

“The business with Lakin. I can’t do research in a group with two guys I like, Feher and Schultz, and one I rub the wrong way, Lakin. Personalities are—”

“I thought scientists rose above mere squabbling. You told me that once.”

“This is more than a squabble, can’t you see that?”

“Ha.”

“Lakin is kind of out of the old school Skeptical. Thinks I’m trying to deliberately make trouble for him.” He ticked off motivations on his fingers. “Getting older and feeling a little shaky, maybe. Hell, I dunno. But I can’t work in a group dominated by a guy like that. I’ve told you that before.”

“Ah.” Her voice had a brittle edge. “So, in effect, we talked that one out, too?”

“Oh, Christ.”

“I’m glad you’re conferring with me on all these problems. On your problems.”

“Look—” he spread his hands, a wide gesture—“I don’t know what I’ll do. I was just talking.”

“It’ll mean leaving La Jolla. Leaving California, where I lived all my life? If that comes up, give me a few minutes to mull it over, okay?”

“Sure. Sure.”

“You can still stay on here, though? It’s your choice?”

“Yeah. We’ll decide it together.”

“Good. Fair and square? Open? No holding yourself aloof?”

“One man, one vote.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“One person, one vote.”

“Zappo.”

Gordon lay down and opened a wrinkled Time magazine against the hovering sun. He tried to dismiss the boiling alternatives in his head and concentrate on a piece in the Science section on the planned Apollo moon shots. He made progress slowly; a decade of reading the close-packed language of physics had robbed him of speed. On the other hand, it did make him more conscious of style. He was gradually coming to feel that the breezy simplicities of Time hid more than they revealed. He was mulling this point when a shadow fell over him.

“Thought I recognized you,” a gruff man’s voice said.

Gordon blinked up into the hazy sunshine. It was Cliff, in a bathing suit and carrying a sixpack of beer.

Gordon became very still. “I thought you lived in northern California.”

“Hey! Cliffie!” Penny had rolled over and seen him. “Whacha doin’ here?” She sat up.

Cliff squatted on the sand, eyeing Gordon. “Jest walkin’ along. My day off. Got a job in Oceanside.”

“And you saw us here?” Penny said happily. “How long have you been down this way? You should’ve called me.”

“Yes,” Gordon said dryly, “a remarkable coincidence.”

“Little over a week. Got me a job in two days flat.”

Cliff hunkered down, not sitting on the sand but resting with the beer in both hands between his legs and his buttocks only an inch from the beach. Gordon remembered seeing Japanese perched like that for hours, in a movie somewhere. It was a curious pose, as though Cliff did not wish to commit himself to fully sitting with them.

Penny burbled on, but Gordon was not listening. He studied Cliff’s sun-baked ease and looked for something behind the eyes, something that explained this improbable coincidence. He did not believe it for an instant, of course. Cliff knew that Penny surfed and that this was the nearest good beach. The only interesting question was whether Penny had known this was going to happen as well.

There was no sign between them, no small inexplicable smiles, no gestures, no false notes that Gordon could see. But that was just it—he wasn’t good at that sort of thing. And as he watched them talking with their slow and easy grace they seemed so alike, so familiar from a thousand movies and cigarette ads, and so strange. Gordon sat, white as the underbelly of a fish in comparison, a flabby dirty alabaster with black swirls of hair. He felt a slow flush of emotion, a wash of feeling he could not quite name. He did not know if this was some elaborate, cute game they were playing, but if it was—

Gordon surged up, lurched to his feet. Penny watched him. Her lips parted in surprise at his stony expression. He struggled for the words, for something to fill the ground between knowledge and suspicion, something just right, and finally mumbled, “Don’t, don’t mind me.”

“Hey, sport, I—”

“Goy games.” Gordon waved a hand in dismissal, face hot. It had come out more bitter than he planned.

“Gordon, come on, really—” Penny began, but he turned away and broke into a trot. The rhythm picked him up instantly. He heard her voice, raised above the crunch of breakers, but it was thin and fading as she called to him. Okay, he thought, no Great Gatsby finish, but it got me out of that, that—

Not ending the sentence, not wanting to think about any of it any more, he ran toward the distant carved hills.