Timescape

CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

IT CAME UP OUT OF THE NOISE, SUDDENLY. ONE MINute the scope showed hash and Gordon was tinkering with a new band-pass filter, a recent circuit he’d breadboarded to cut through the noise. Then, abruptly, the NMR curves began to warp and change. He stared at the scope, unmoving. It was 11 p.m.

He brought his hand up to his lips, as if to mask a cry. The jiggling lines went on. It occurred to Gordon that he might be hallucinating. He bit his finger. No, the ragged lines remained. Quickly, suppressing his excitement beneath the urge to be precise, he began to take data.

“Claudia? Is that you?” It was the first time he had ever called her by her first name. “Yes, yes, is this Gordon?”

“Right. I’ve been running parallel with you. Were you people on last night?”

“What?”

“Were you running last night?” “I… no, I don’t… my student was making some measurements. I believed he finished about 6 o’clock.”

“Shit.”

“What? I’m sorry, I don’t believe I can hear you correctly—”

“Sorry, never mind. I, ah, I was running last night around 11 p.m. and I got some anomalous resonance effects.”

“I see. Well, that would be 2 a.m. here.”

“Oh yes. Of course.”

“How long did the effect last?”

“Over two hours.”

“Well, let me see, the student should be in soon; it is a little after eight. Gordon, you are up at 5 a.m.?”

“Ah, yes. I was waiting for you to get in.”

“Have you slept?”

“No, I… I was seeing if there was any more of the—the effect.”

“Gordon, go to sleep. I will talk to the student. We will run some experiments today. But you get some sleep.”

“Sure, sure.”

“I promise you we will do the measurements. But get some sleep, eh?”

“Good. Good. That’s all I want.”

“Gordon, Mrs. Evelstein, she brought over the Life magazine. Why didn’t you tell me? There was my son’s name, big as life—as Life!—and he doesn’t tell me. Weeks ago, it was, and—”

“Mom, look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I—”

“And the National Enquirer thing, she had that, too. That one I didn’t like so good.”

He breathed sourly into the telephone receiver. What time was it? Christ, 5 p.m. What was the Zinnes group getting?

“Look, Mom, I was asleep, I—”

“Asleep? At this hour?”

“I was working in the lab overnight.”

“You shouldn’t, you’ll ruin your health.”

“I’m okay.”

“But I wanted to say, about the Life, it was such a surprise—”

“Mom, I’ve got to go back to sleep. I’m worn out.”

“Well, all right. I wanted to hear your voice again, though, Gordon. I don’t hear your voice so much any more.”

“I know, Mom. Look, I’ll call you in a few days.”

“All right, Gordon.”

He hung up and went back to sleep.

The Zinnes group found nothing. Gordon could not pick up the signal again. He kept checking as the week wore on. On Friday there was a department Colloquium on plasma physics, given by Norman Rostoker. Gordon went and sat well in the back. Rostoker’s first slide was:

The audience laughed. Gordon did, too. He wondered at which stage he was. But no, the whole message thing wasn’t a directed research project, it was a discovery. The fact that he was the only person in the world who believed it made no difference. “Search for the Guilty,” though, seemed to fit. He thought about it for a moment and then, in the middle of Rostoker’s talk, fell asleep.

He answered the call from Ramsey’s office and found Ramsey in the lab. The chemist had broken down the interweaving chain into a plausible configuration. Phosphorous, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon. It made sense. What was more, it fit into a class that resembled the pesticides. More sophisticated, yes—but a clear lineal descendant. Gordon smiled, still sleepy from the Colloquium. “Good work,” he murmured. Ramsey beamed. On his way out Gordon passed through the glass forest of the laboratory. He had come to enjoy its rhythms. The biologists down the hall had pens of animals for their tests and Gordon wandered down that way, feeling obscurely happy. On a cart in the hallway there were trays. In them were heaps of gutted brown hamsters, like burst potatoes. Life in the service of life. He walked away quickly.

His telephone rang at 6 p.m., as he was putting papers and books in his briefcase for the weekend. The physics building was nearly deserted and the ringing echoed.

“Gordon, this is Claudia Zinnes,”

“Oh, hello. Have you—?”

“We have something. Interruptions.” She went on to describe them.

“Look, ah, do me a favor? Try to break them down into patterns. I mean, I know it’s late and it’s, what, 9 o’clock there, but if you—”

“I think I understand you.”

Exhaling: “See if it fits Morse code.”

A quiet laugh. “I’ll see, Gordon.”

He asked her to call him at home and gave her the number.

“I told you last week” Penny said. “We’re going Air Cal to Oakland Saturday morning at ten, out of Lindbergh.”

“I don’t remember it.”

“Oh, crap. I told you.”

“Penny, I have a lot to do this weekend. A lot to think about.”

“Think about it in Oakland.”

“No, I can’t, you can tell your parents we—”

The telephone rang.

“Claudia?”

“Gordon? I checked and, and, you were right,”

A sudden hot dizzyness swarmed over him. “What does it say?”

“Those astronomical coordinates you told me about. That’s all I have. They go on for pages.”

“Great. That’s just great.”

“What is it, Gordon?”

“I don’t know.”

They spoke for a few more moments. Claudia would keep their experiment running constantly. Signal strength seemed to come and go irregularly. Gordon listened, nodded, agreed. But his mind was not on the details. Instead, an odd sensation had begun to creep up through his legs and into his chest. He put down the telephone after saying good night and felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. It was real. All along he had reserved a certain possibility that he was a potzer, that the experiment was wrong, that he was finding books in babbling brooks, as Penny once joked about it. But now he knew: someone was trying to reach him.

“Gordon? Gordon, what is it?”

“Zinnes. New York.” He looked up, dazed. “They found it.”

She kissed him and together they did a little jig. No potzer, he. Gordon lurched around the living room, barking jubilantly ha and right! After a moment he felt dizzy and sat down. He was suddenly tired. Scratch one hypothesis, mark up one fact. But what should he do next?

“Penny, you’re right—we go to Oakland.”