Timescape

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

COOPER LOOKED DOUBTFUL. “YOU THINK THIS IS enough?”

“For now, yeah. Who knows?”—Gordon shrugged—“Maybe for good, too.”

“I at least ought to fill in some of the high field observations.”

“Not that important.”

“After what that committee did to me, I want to be sure—”

“More data isn’t the answer. You need more background reading, more analysis of your data, things like that. Not more numbers churning out of the lab.”

“You sure?”

“You can close out your run by tomorrow.”

“Umm. Well, okay.”

In reality, Cooper probably could strengthen his case with more data. Gordon had always disliked the practice of overmeasuring every effect, though, mostly because he suspected it deadened the imagination. After a while you saw only what you expected to see. How could he be sure Cooper was really taking all the data as it came?

This was a justifiable reason for bumping Cooper off the NMR rig, but that wasn’t why Gordon did it. Claudia Zinnes would be starting up in September. If she found anything anomalous, Gordon wanted to be running simultaneously.

Gordon came home from the lab hungry. Penny had already eaten and was watching the 11 o’clock news. “Want anything?” he called from the kitchen.

“No.”

“What’s that you’re watching?”

“March on Washington.”

“Uh?”

“Martin Luther King. You know.”

He hadn’t been paying any attention to the news. He asked nothing more; discussing politics with Penny would only set her off. She had been elaborately casual since he had returned. There was an odd truce between them, not a peace.

“Hey,” he called, coming into the living room, which was lit only by the pale electric glow of the TV. “Dishwasher won’t go on.”

“Uh huh.” She didn’t turn her head.

“Did you call?”

“No. You, for once.”

“I did last.”

“Well, I’m not. Hate that. Let it be broke.”

“You spend more time with it than me.”

“That’ll change, too.”

“What?”

“Not busting ass to fix meals any more.”

“Didn’t think you had.”

“How’d you know. You couldn’t fry butter.”

“Two points off for credibility,” he said lightly. “You know I can cook some things, anyway.”

“Come on.”

“I’m serious,” he said sharply. “I’m going to be in the lab a lot and—”

“Loud and prolonged applause.”

“For Chrissake.”

“I won’t be here much, so.”

“Neither will I except in and out.”

“Least you’re doing something now.”

“Crap, that’s not what you’re on the rag about.”

“Metaphorical rag?”

“Real rag, metawhatever rag—how do I know?”

“I thought you thought maybe real rag. Otherwise maybe you would’ve touched me since you got back.”

“Oh.”

“Didn’t notice, huh?”

Grimly: “I noticed.”

“Okay, why?”

“Wasn’t thinking about it, I guess.”

“Think about it.”

“You know, busy.”

“Think I don’t know? Come on, Gordon. I saw your face when you got off that plane. We were going to have a drink at the El Cortez, look at the city. Lunch.”

“Okay. Look, I need dinner.”

“You dinner, I’ll watch the speech.”

“Good. Wine?”

“Sure. Enough for later?”

“Later?”

“My mother should’ve taught me to be more direct. Later, when we fuck.”

“Oh, yes. Fuck we will.”

They did. It wasn’t very good.

Gordon broke Cooper’s experiment down to the basic components. Then he rebuilt it. He checked each piece for shielding, looking for any way an unsuspected signal could get into the circuitry. He had most of it reassembled when Saul Shriffer appeared, unannounced, in the lab.

“Gordon! I was just at UCLA and thought I’d drop by.”

“Oh, hi,” Gordon murmured, wiping his hands on an oily cloth. A man with a camera followed Saul into the lab.

“This is Alex Paturski, from Life. They’re doing a piece on exobiology.”

“I’d appreciate a few shots,” Paturski said. Gordon murmured yeah, sure, and Paturski quickly brought in reflecting screens and camera gear. Saul talked about the reaction to his announcement. “Dreadful example of closed minds,” Saul said. “Nobody is following up our lead. I can’t get anyone in the astronomical community to give the idea five seconds.” Gordon concurred, and decided not to tell Saul about Claudia Zinnes. Paturski circled them, clicking and bobbing. “Turn this way a little more, eh?” and Saul would do as directed. Gordon followed suit, wishing he wore something more than a T-shirt and jeans. This was, of course, the one day he had not worn his usual slacks and Oxford broadcloth.

“Great, gentlemen, just great,” Paturski said in conclusion. Saul inspected the experiment a moment. Gordon showed him some preliminary warmup traces he’d taken. Sensitivity was low but the curves were obviously clean resonance lines.

“Too bad. More results could open this whole thing up again, you know.” Saul studied him. “Let me know if you see anything, okay?”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“No, I suppose not.” Saul appeared momentarily dejected. “I really thought there was something to it, too.”

“Maybe there is.”

“Yes. Yes, of course, perhaps there is.” He brightened. “Don’t get the idea that it’s all over, eh? When it’s died out a little, and people have stopped hooting with laughter at the very idea—well, it’ll make a good article. Maybe something for Science titled ‘Tilting at Orthodox Windmills,’ That might go over,”

“Uh huh.”

“Well, Alex and I have to be off. We’re going up through Escondido to Palomar.”

“Doing some observing there?” Gordon asked casually.

“No. No, I don’t do the observations, you know. I’m more an idea man. Alex wants to take some pictures, that’s all. It’s an awesome place.”

“Oh yes.”

In a moment they were gone and he could get back to his experiment.

The first day Gordon got the NMR rig back on the air there were signal-to-noise problems. On the second day stray leakage waves clouded the results. One of the indium antimonide samples acted funny and he had to cycle the rig down, dump the cold bath and pull the defective sample. That took hours. Only on the third day did the resonance curves begin to look right. They were reassuringly accurate. They fit theory quite well, within the crossbars of experimental error. Beautiful, Gordon thought. Beautiful and dull. He kept the rig running all day, in part to be sure the electronics stayed stable. He found he could take care of ordinary business—coaching Cooper; making up lecture notes for the coming semester; cutting the tiny gray indium antimonide bars on the hot-wire, oil-immersion setup—and duck into the lab for a quick NMR measurement every hour or two. He set-ed into a routine. Things got done. The curves remained normal.

“Professor Bernstein?” the woman said, her voice pitched high and grating. He wondered idly if her accent was midwestern. “Yes,” he said into the telephone.

“This is Adele Morrison with Senior Scholastic Magazine. We are doing a major piece on the, uh, claim you and Professor Shriffer have made. We are treating it as an example of controversy in science. I wondered—”

“Why?”

“Pardon?”

“Why bring it up? I’d prefer you just forgot about it.”

“Well, Professor Bernstein, I don’t know, I… Professor Shriffer was most cooperative. He said he thought our readership—which is high school seniors, you know—would learn a great deal from such a study.”

“I’m not so sure of that.”

“Well, Professor, I’m afraid I’m only an assistant editor here, I don’t make policy. I believe the article is—yes, here, it’s already in galley form. It’s mostly an interview with your colleague, Professor Shriffer.”

“Uh huh.”

The voice rose higher. “I was asked to see if you had any final comment on the, uh, status of the, uh, controversy. We could add it to the galleys now if—”

“No. Nothing to say.”

“You’re sure? The editor asked me to—”

“I’m sure. Let it go as is.”

“Well, all right. We have several other professors quoted in the article and they make some very critical comments. I thought you should know that.”

For a moment it tempted him. He could ask their names and listen to the quotations and frame some reply The woman was waiting, the phone spitting that faint hiss of long distance. He blinked. She was good; she’d almost hooked him into it. “No, they can say what they like. Let Saul carry this one.” He hung up. Let the scholastic seniors of this great nation think whatever they wanted. He only hoped the article wouldn’t increase the rate of crank visits.

The summer sun bleached everything into a flatness stripped of perspective. Penny came in from surfing and plopped down beside Gordon. “Too many wipeouts,” she explained. “Rip tide, too. Kept sucking me into the pilings.”

“Running is a lot safer,” he observed.

“And boring.”

“But not worthless.”

“Maybe. Oh, that reminds me—I’m going up to see my parents some time soon. I’d go before classes, but Dad is off on some business trip.”

“What reminded you of that?”

“Huh? Oh. Well, you said running wasn’t worthless, and I remembered that I had a student last semester who used the longest word in the English language, deliberately, in a paper I was grading. It’s ‘floccinaucinihilipilification.’ It means ‘the act of estimating as worthless.’”

“Um. Really.”

“Yeah, and I had to look the damn thing up. It isn’t in any American dictionary, but. I found it in the Oxford English.”

“And?”

“That’s the dictionary my Daddy gave me.”

Gordon smiled and lay back on the sand, hoisting an Esquire up to blot out the sun. “You’re a highly nonlinear lady.”

“Whatever that means.”

“It’s a compliment, believe me.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Do you want to go up to Oakland with me or not?”

“That’s what this is about?”

“Despite your attempts to avoid it, yes.”

“Attempts to—? Penny, you’ve been reading too much Kafka. Yes, sure, I’ll go.”

“When?”

“How should I know? It’s your trip, your parents.” She nodded. An odd, pinched expression appeared on her face, then vanished. Gordon wondered what she was feeling but he knew no simple way to ask. He opened his mouth to begin a fumbling approach, and then gave up. Was going to Oakland part of the courtship dance, taking the boy home to be viewed? Maybe that was only an east coast phenomenon; he wasn’t sure. After announcing that she didn’t want to marry him, and then staying on and living with him as though things would just keep going that way, Penny had become an utter mystery to him. Gordon sighed to himself, giving up on the whole subject.

He read for a few minutes and then said, “Hey, it says here the Test Ban Treaty is in effect.”

“Sure,” Penny murmured, rolling over from her drowsy sleep in the sun. “Kennedy signed it months ago.”

“I must’ve missed it.” Gordon thought of Dyson and Orion, a strangely appealing dream that was now dead. Nobody was going to get out to the planets right away; the space program would limp along on liquid fuel rockets. It struck Gordon that the times were pressing in now. New ideas and new people were coming into the old La Jolla of Chandler’s day. The same Kennedy who had pushed the Test Ban and killed Orion was also federalizing the Alabama National Guard, to stop George Wallace from using them against the desegregation program. Medgar Evers had been killed just a few months before. There was a feeling running through the country now, that things had to change.

Gordon tossed the magazine aside. He rolled over beneath the sun’s broiling and began to doze off. A sea breeze brought a sour reek of the rotting kelp bank farther down the beach. He wrinkled his nose. The hell with the press of the times. Politics is for the moment, Einstein said once. An equation is for eternity. If he had to choose sides, Gordon was on the side of the equations.

That evening he took Penny out to dinner and then dancing at the El Cortez. It wasn’t the sort of thing he usually did, but the strange, stretching tension between them needed attention. They talked during dinner. Over drinks afterward, he began, “Penny, the thing between us, it’s complicated…” She replied, “No, it’s complex.” He hesitated and murmured, “Well, okay, but…” She said sharply, “There’s a difference.” And for some reason that made him angry. He decided to shut up, let the evening go on in the mindless, evening-out-with-the-wifey way she seemed to like. It was odd how she could be a very intelligent, uncompromising literature student one moment, and then in the next come on as ordinary, middle-America, relentlessly oatmeal. Maybe she was part of this time, of things changing.

They danced only to the slow numbers. She moved deftly, lightly, in a slim pink dress. He wore heavy black shoes left over from New York and now and then would miss the beat. The male vocalist sang, in a bluesy voice, “People stay, just a little bit longer. We wanna play, just a little bit more.” Penny suddenly hugged him to her with remarkably strong arms. “Sam Cooke,” she murmured into his ear. He didn’t know what she meant. The idea of knowing who had composed a certain pop song seemed, well, faintly incredible.