Timescape

CHAPTER ONE

REMEMBER TO SMILE A LOT, JOHN RENFREW thought moodily. People seemed to like that. They never wondered why you kept on smiling, no matter what was said. It was a kind of general sign of good will, he supposed, one of the tricks he could never master.

“Daddy, look—”

“Damn, watch out!” Renfrew cried. “Get that paper out of my porridge, will you? Marjorie, why are the bloody dogs in the kitchen while we’re having breakfast?”

Three figures in suspended animation stared at him. Marjorie, turning from the stove with a spatula in her hand. Nicky, raising a spoon to a mouth which formed an O of surprise. Johnny beside him, holding out a school paper, his face beginning to fall. Renfrew knew what was going through his wife’s mind. John must be really upset. He never gets angry.

Right, he didn’t. It was another luxury they couldn’t afford.

The still photograph unfroze. Marjorie moved abruptly, shooing the yelping dogs out the back door. Nicky bowed her head to study her cooked cereal. Then Marjorie led Johnny back to his place at the table. Renfrew took a long, rustling breath and bit into his toast.

“Don’t bother Daddy today, Johnny. He’s got a very important meeting this morning.”

A meek nod. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

Daddy. They all called him Daddy. Not Pop, as Renfrew’s father had wanted to be called. That was a name for fathers with rough hands, who worked with caps on.

Renfrew looked moodily round the table. Sometimes he felt out of place here, in his own kitchen. That was his son sitting there in a Perse school uniform blazer, speaking in that clear upper-class voice. Renfrew remembered the confusing mixture of contempt and envy he had felt towards such boys when he was Johnny’s age. At times he would glance casually at Johnny and the memory of those times would come back. Renfrew would brace himself for that familiar well-bred indifference in his son’s face—and be moved to find admiration there instead.

“I’m the one should be sorry, lad. I didn’t mean to shout at you like that. It’s as your mother said, I’m a bit bothered today. So what’s this paper you wanted to show me, eh?”

“Well, they’re having this competition for the best paper—” Johnny began shyly “—on how school kids can help clean up the environment and everything and save energy and things. I wanted you to see it before I give it in.”

Renfrew bit his lip. “I haven’t got time today, Johnny. When does it have to be in? I’ll try and read it through tonight if I can. Okay?”

“Okay. Thanks, Daddy. I’ll leave it here. I know you’re doing frightfully important work. The English master said so.”

“Oh, did he? What did he say?”

“Well, actually…” The boy hesitated. “He said the scientists got us into this beastly mess in the first place and they’re the only ones who can get us out of it now, if anyone can.”

“He’s not the first one to say that, Johnny. That’s a truism.”

“Truism? What’s a truism, Daddy?”

“My form mistress says just the opposite,” Nicky came in suddenly. “She says the scientists have caused enough trouble already. She says God is the only one who can get us out of it and He probably won’t.”

“Oh, lor’, another prophet of doom. Well, I suppose that’s better than the primmies and their back-to-the-stone-age rubbish. Except that the prophets of doom stay around and depress us all.”

“Miss Crenshaw says the primmies won’t escape God’s judgment either, however far they run,” Nicky said definitively.

“Marjorie, what’s going on in that school? I don’t want her filling Nicky’s head with ideas like that. The woman sounds unbalanced. Speak to the headmistress about her.”

“I doubt that it would do much good,” Marjorie replied equably. “There are far more ‘prophets of doom,’ as you call them, around than anyone else these days.”

“Miss Crenshaw says we should all just pray,” Nicky went on obstinately. “Miss Crenshaw says it’s a judgment. And probably the end of the world.”

“Well, that’s just silly, dear,” Marjorie said. “Where would we be if we all just sat about and prayed? You have to get on with things. Speaking of which, you children had better get a move on or you’ll be late to school.”

“Miss Crenshaw says, ‘Consider the lilies of the field,’” Nicky muttered as she left the room.

“Well, I’m no bloody lily,” Renfrew said, pushing back his chair and rising, “so I’d better go off and toil for another day.”

“Leaving me to spin?” Marjorie smiled. “It’s the only way, isn’t it? Here’s your lunch. No meat again this week, but I got a bit of cheese at the farm and I pulled some early carrots. I think we may have some potatoes this year. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” She reached up and kissed him. “I do hope the interview goes well.”

“Thanks, luv.” He felt the old familiar tightening begin. He had to get that funding. He’d put vast sums of time and thought into this project. He must have the equipment. It had to be tried.

Renfrew left the house and mounted his bicycle. Already he was sloughing off the family man, his thoughts reaching ahead to the lab, the day’s instructions to the technicians, the coming interview with Peterson.

He pumped along, leaving Grantchester and skirting round Cambridge. It had rained during the night. A slight mist hung low over the ploughed fields, softening the light. Drops clung to the new green leaves on the trees. Moisture glittered on the carpet of bluebells covering the ground in the clearings. The lane here ran alongside a little stream lined by low alder bushes and nettles. On the surface of the stream he could see ripples forming as the bugs called water boatmen jerked themselves along on their oarlike legs. Kingcups were blooming in a sheet of gold along the banks and big soft furry catkins were coming out on the willows. It was a fresh April morning, the kind he had loved as a boy in Yorkshire, watching the mist rise off the moors in the pale morning sun and the hares scurry off at his approach. The lane he was cycling along had sunk deep over the years and his head was nearly level with the tree roots on either side. A smell of damp earth and rain-washed grass came to him, mixed with an acrid tang of coal smoke.

A man and a woman eyed him blankly as he pedaled by. They leaned idly against a sagging wood fence. Renfrew grimaced. Each month more squatters drifted into the area, thinking Cambridge was a rich town. Off to the right was the shambles of an old farmhouse. In the last week the yawning black windows had been blocked in with newspaper, boards, and rags. It was surprising squatters hadn’t smelled out the place before.

The last bit of cycling, nipping through the outskirts of Cambridge, was the worst. The streets were difficult to negotiate, with cars parked every which way, abandoned. There had been a national program to recycle them, but all Renfrew had seen come of it was a lot of talk on television. He threaded among the cars, which sat there like eyeless, legless beetles, stripped of all their removable parts. Students were living in some of them. Drowsy faces turned to watch him wobble by.

In front of the Cavendish he locked his bicycle into the rack. One car in the lot, he noticed. Surely that bugger Peterson wasn’t here this early? It wasn’t yet 8:30. He trotted up the steps and across the entrance hall.

To Renfrew the present complex of three buildings was anonymous. The original Cav, where Rutherford had discovered the nucleus, was an old brick building in the center of Cambridge, a museum. From the Madingley Road two hundred meters away this place could easily be taken for an insurance center or a factory or any business place. When it had opened in the early ‘70s the “new Cav” had been immaculate, with harmonized color schemes, carpets in the library, and well-stocked shelves. Now the corridors were poorly lit and many laboratories yawned empty, stripped of equipment. Renfrew made his way to his own lab in the Mott building.

“Good morning, Dr. Renfrew.”

“Oh, morning, Jason. Has anyone been in?”

“Well, George came in to start the roughing pumps, but—”

“No, no, I mean a visitor. I’m expecting a fellow from London. Peterson’s his name.”

“Oh, no. No one like that. You want me to get started here, then?”

“Yes, go ahead. How’s the apparatus?”

“Fairly good. The vacuum is coming down. We’re at ten microns now. We’ve got a fresh charge of liquid nitrogen and we’ve checked out the electronics. Looks as if one of the amplifiers is going. We’re doing some calibrations and the equipment should be checked out in about an hour.”

“Okay. Look here, Jason, this fellow Peterson is coming down from the World Council. He’s considering increasing funding. We’ll have a run for him, put the apparatus through its paces in a few hours. Try to look lively and spruce the place up a bit, will you?”

“Right. I’ll get her running.”

Renfrew went down the catwalk to the floor of the laboratory and stepped nimbly over the wires and cables. The room was of bare concrete, outfitted with old-fashioned electrical connections and rather newer cables strewn through the aisles of apparatus. Renfrew greeted each of the technicians as he came to them, asked questions about the running of the ion focusers, and gave his instructions. He knew this warren of equipment well now, had painfully gathered the pieces and designed it himself. The liquid nitrogen went tick and burbled in its flask. Powered units hummed in spots where there was a slight voltage mismatch. The oscilloscopes’ green faces danced and rippled with smooth yellow curves. He felt at home.

Renfrew seldom noticed the austere walls and blocky angles of his lab; to him it was a comfortable gathering of familiar elements working together. He could not fathom the now-fashionable abhorrence of things mechanical; he suspected it was one side of a coin, the other being awe. But either was nonsense. One might as well feel the same emotions about a skyscraper, for example, yet the building was no greater than a man—men made it, not the other way round. The universe of artifacts was a human one. As Renfrew moved through the lanes of bulky electronics, he sometimes seemed to himself a fish swimming in the warm waters of his own ocean, carrying the elaborate scheme of the experiment as a multi-layered diagram in his mind, checking it against the never-perfect reality before him. He loved this thinking, correcting, and searching for the unseen flaw that could destroy the whole effect he wanted.

He had assembled most of this apparatus by scavenging among the other research groups in the Cav. Research had always been a highly visible luxury, easily cut. The past five years had been a disaster. When a group had been shut down, Renfrew had salvaged what he could. He had started out in the nuclear resonance group as a specialist in making beams of high-energy ions. This became important in the discovery of a completely new kind of subatomic particle, the tachyon, which had been theorized about for decades. Renfrew had moved over into that field. He had kept his small crew afloat by adroit grantsmanship and by using the fact that tachyons, as the newest of the new, had a clear intellectual claim to whatever funds remained in the National Research Council. The NRC had dissolved last year, though.

This year research was a puppet whose strings led to the World Council itself. The western nations had pooled their research efforts in a gesture towards economy. The World Council was a political animal. To Renfrew it seemed the Council’s policies boiled down to supporting highly visible efforts and little else. The fusion reactor program still got a lion’s share, despite no apparent progress. The Cav’s best groups, such as radio astronomy, had disbanded last year when the Council decided astronomy as a whole was impractical and such work should be suspended “for the duration.” Precisely how long the duration might be was a point the Council neatly dodged. The idea was that as the present crisis deepened the western nations had to shuck off their research luxuries in favor of sweaty-browed concentration on the ecoproblems and assorted disasters which dominated the newspaper headlines. But one had to sail with whatever wind was blowing, Renfrew knew. He had managed to find a way that tachyons could have a “practical” purpose, and that slant had kept his group afloat so far.

Renfrew finished calibrating some electronics gear—it was always going on the blink these days—and paused for a moment, listening to the preoccupied hum of the lab around him.

“Jason,” he called, “I’m off to get coffee. Keep it all going, will you?”

He picked his old corduroy jacket off a hook and stretched mightily, showing crescents of sweat in the cloth around his armpits. In mid-stretch he noticed two men on the platform. One of the technicians was pointing down at Renfrew, talking, and as Renfrew lowered his arms the other man started down the catwalk to the laboratory.

Renfrew had a sudden memory of his college days at Oxford. He had been walking down a corridor which gave back the hollow, ringing echo only stonework can. It was a beautiful October morning and he was brimming with eagerness to begin this new life he had looked forward to, the goal of the long student years. He had known he was bright; here, among his intellectual equals, he would at last find his niche. He had come in on the train from York the night before and now he wanted to get out into the morning sun and take it all in.

There were two of them sauntering towards him down the corridor. They wore their short academic gowns like courtiers’ robes and they walked as though they owned the building. They were talking loudly as they approached him and looked him over as if he were an Irishman. As they passed him, one said with a lazy drawl, “Oh, God, another bloody yokel up on a scholarship.” It had set the tone of his years at Oxford. He had got a First, of course, and he had made his name now in the physics world. But he had always felt that even if they were wasting their time, they were enjoying life more than he ever could.

The memory of it stung again as he watched Peterson walk towards him. At this distance in time, he could not remember the faces of those two undergraduate snobs and there was probably no physical resemblance, but this man wore the same graceful, arrogant self-assurance. Also, he noticed the way Peterson dressed and he resented noticing another man’s clothes. Peterson was tall and lean and dark-haired. At a distance, he gave the impression of a young and athletic dandy. He walked lightly, not like the rugby player that Renfrew had been in his youth, but like a tennis or polo player or perhaps even a javelin thrower. Seen closer, he looked to be in his early forties and was unmistakably a man used to wielding power. He was handsome in a rather severe way. There was no contempt in his expression, but Renfrew thought bitterly that he had probably just learned to hide it in his adult years. Pull yourself together, John, he admonished himself silently. You’re the expert, not him. And smile.

“Good morning, Dr. Renfrew.” The smooth voice was just what he had expected.

“Good morning, Mr. Peterson,” he murmured, holding out a large square hand. “Pleased to meet you.” Damn, why had he said that? It might almost have been his father’s voice: “I’m reet pleased to meet ya, lad.” He was getting paranoid. There was nothing in Peterson’s face to indicate anything but seriousness about his job.

“Is this the experiment?” Peterson looked round with a remote expression.

“Yes, would you like to see it first?”

“Please.”

They passed some old gray cabinets of English manufacture and some newer equipment housed in brightly colored compartments from Tektronics, Physics International, and other American firms. These garish red and yellow units came from the small Council appropriation. Renfrew led Peterson to a complex array housed between the poles of a large magnet.

“Superconducting setup, of course. We need the high field strength to get a nice, sharp line during transmission.”

Peterson studied the maze of wires and meters. Cabinets housing rank upon rank of electronics towered over them. He pointed out a particular object and asked its function.

“Oh, I didn’t think you’d be wanting to know much of the technical side,” Renfrew said.

“Try me.”

“Well, we’ve got a large indium antimonide sample in there, see—” Renfrew pointed at the encased volume between the magnet poles. “We hit it with high-energy ions. When the ions strike the indium they give off tachyons. It’s a complex, very sensitive ion-nuclei reaction.” He glanced at Peterson. “Tachyons are particles that travel faster than light, you know. On the other side—” he pointed around the magnets, leading Peterson to a long blue cylindrical tank that protruded ten meters away from the magnets “—we draw out the tachyons and focus them into a beam. They have a particular energy and spin, so they resonate only with indium nuclei in a strong magnetic field.”

“And when they hit something in the way?”

“That’s the point,” Renfrew said sharply. “Tachyons have to strike a nucleus in precisely the correct state of energy and spin before they lose any energy in the process. They pass right through ordinary matter. That’s why we can shoot them across light years without having them scattered out of their path.”

Peterson said nothing. He scowled at the equipment.

“But when one of our tachyons strikes an indium nucleus in precisely the right state—a situation that doesn’t occur naturally very often—it will be absorbed. That tips the spin of the indium nucleus away from wherever it was pointing. Think of the indium nucleus as a little arrow that gets knocked to the side. If all the little arrows were pointing in one direction before the tachyons arrived, then they would get disordered. That would be noticeable and—”

“I see, I see,” Peterson said disdainfully. Renfrew wondered if he had overdone that bit about little arrows. It would be fatal if Peterson thought he was talking down to him—which of course he was.

“That’s some other fellow’s indium, I suppose?”

Renfrew held his breath. This was the tricky part. “Yes. An experiment operating in the year 1963,” he said slowly.

Peterson said drily, “I read the preliminary report. These prelims are often deceptive, but I understood that. The technical staff tell me it makes sense, but I can’t believe some of the things you’ve written. This business of altering the past—”

“Look, there’s this fellow Markham coming—he’ll put you straight on that.”

“If he can.”

“Right. See, the reason nobody’s even tried to send messages back is an obvious one, once you think of it. We can build a transmitter, see, but there’s no receiver. Nobody in the past ever built one.”

Peterson frowned. “Well, of course—”

Renfrew went on enthusiastically. “We’ve built one, naturally, to do our preliminary experiments. But the people back in 1963 didn’t know about tachyons. So the trick is to interfere with something they’re already doing. That’s the ticket.”

“Um.”

“We try to concentrate bursts of tachyons and aim them just so—”

“Hold on.” Peterson said, putting up a hand. “Aim for what? Where is 1963?”

“Quite far away, as it works out. Since 1963, the earth’s been going round the sun, while the sun itself is revolving around the hub of the galaxy, and so on. Add that up and you find 1963 is pretty distant.”

“Relative to what?”

“Well, relative to the center of mass of the local group of galaxies, of course. Mind, the local group is moving, too, relative to the frame of reference provided by the microwave radiation background, and—”

“Look, skip the jargon, can’t you? You’re saying 1963 is in the sky somewhere?”

“Quite so. We send out a beam of tachyons to hit that spot. We sweep the volume of space occupied by the earth at that particular time.”

“Sounds impossible.”

Renfrew measured his words. “I think not. The trick is creating tachyons with essentially infinite speed—”

Peterson made a wry, tired smile. “Ah—‘essentially infinite’? Comic technical talk.”

“I mean, with immeasurably high velocity,” Renfrew said precisely. “Sorry for the terminology, if that’s what bothers you.”

“Well, look, I’m only trying to understand.”

“Yes, yes, sorry, I may have jumped the gun there.” Renfrew visibly composed himself for a fresh attack. “Mind, the essential trick here is to get these high-velocity tachyons. Then, if we can hit the right spot in space, we can send a message back quite a way.”

“These tachyon beams will go straight through a star?”

Renfrew frowned. “We don’t know, actually. There’s a possibility that other reactions—between these tachyons and other nuclei besides indium—will be fairly strong. There’s no data on those cross sections yet. If they are, a planet or a star getting in the way could be trouble.”

“But you’ve tried simpler tests? I read in the report—”

“Yes, yes, they’ve been very successful.”

“Well, still—” Peterson gestured at the maze of equipment. “This strikes me as a fine physics sort of experiment. Commendable. But—” he shook his head “—well, I’m amazed you got the money for this.”

Renfrew’s face tightened. “It’s not all that bloody much.”

Peterson sighed. “Look here, Dr. Renfrew, I’ll be frank with you. I’m down here to evaluate this for the Council, because some pretty big names have said it makes some sort of sense. I don’t feel I have the technical background to evaluate this properly. No one on the Council has. We’re ecologists and biologists and systems people for the most part.”

“Should be broader based.”

“Granted, yes. Our idea in the past has been to bring in specialists as they’re needed.”

Gruffly: “So reach Davies at King’s College in London. He’s keen on this and—”

“There isn’t time for that. We’re looking for emergency measures.”

Renfrew said slowly, “It’s that bad?”

Peterson paused, as though he had given away too much. “Yes. Looks so.”

“I can move fast, if that’s your idea,” Renfrew said briskly.

“You may have to.”

“It would be better if we got a whole new generation of equipment in here,” Renfrew took in the lab with a hand wave. “The Americans have developed new electronics gear that would improve matters. To be really sure we got through, we need the Americans to come in. Most of the circuitry I need is being developed in their national labs, Brookhaven and so on.”

Peterson nodded. “So your report said. That’s why I want this fellow Markham in on this today.”

“Has he got the necessary weight to swing it?”

“I think so. He’s well thought of, I’m told, and he’s an American on the spot. That’s what his National Science Foundation needs to cover itself in case—”

“Ah, I see. Well, Markham’s due here any time now. Come have some coffee in my office.”

Peterson followed him into the cluttered den. Renfrew cleared books and papers off a chair, bustling about in that nervous manner people have when they have suddenly realized, along with a guest that their office is messy. Peterson sat down, lifting his trousers at the knees and then crossing his legs. Renfrew made more of a business than necessary out of fetching the acrid-smelling coffee, because he wanted time to think. Things were starting badly; Renfrew wondered if the memories from Oxford had soured him automatically on Peterson. Well, there was nothing for it; everyone was fairly edgy these days, anyway. Perhaps Markham could smooth things over when he arrived.