Timescape

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

PENNY’S VOICE CUT THROUGH TO HIM: “AS I WAS SAYING.”

“Huh? Oh, yes, go on.”

“Come on, you weren’t listening at all.” She swerved the rented Thunderbird around a curve. The Bay Area lay below and to the right, the twinkling of the bay hazed by fog. “Absent-minded prof.”

“Okay, okay.” But he slipped back into a fog of his own as she zoomed them around Grizzly Peak’s hairpin turns above the Berkeley campus and then onto Skyline. He glimpsed Oakland’s sprawl, green dots of islands in the blue-gray bay, and San Francisco in alabaster isolation. They flitted behind stands of pine and eucalyptus, the trees making black and green grids against the brown of the hillsides. Penny had the top down. Cool air made her hair stream and float behind her head. “Mount Tamalfuji!” she called, pointing at a short, blunted peak to the north across the bay. Then they were into the descent, brakes squealing and gears growling as she took them down Broadway Terrace. A forest musk enveloped them. They emerged from the tree-thick hillside and shot past a jumble of houses, a technicolor spattering. Traffic thinned as they neared her parents’ house. Clearly, a ritzy section with an appropriately posh name: Piedmont. Gordon thought of Long Island and Gatsby and yellow sedans.

Her parents proved unmemorable. Gordon could not be sure whether this was due to them or to him. His mind kept drifting back to the experiment and the messages, rummaging for some fresh tool to pry up the lid of the mystery. Come at it from a different angle, Penny had said once. He couldn’t get the phrase out of his mind. He found he could carry on conversation and smile and do the dance of guest and host, without ever really taking part in what was going on. Penny’s father was big and reassuringly gruff, a man who knew how to turn money into more money. He had the standard graying temples and a certain sunbaked assurance. Her mother seemed serene, a joiner of clubs and charities, a scrupulous housekeeper. Gordon felt he had met them before but couldn’t place them, like characters in a movie whose title won’t spring to the lips.

The invitation had been to stay over at the house. Gordon insisted on their staying in a motel on University Avenue—to put them smack in the middle of town, he said, but in fact because he wanted to avoid the touchy question of whether they would share a room in her parents’ castle. He wasn’t ready for that issue, not this weekend.

Her father had heard about the Saul thing, of course, and wanted to talk about it. Gordon told him just enough to be polite and then deflected talk to the department, UCLJ, and gradually to topics further and further away. Her father—“Jack,” he said with a warm, forthright handshake, “just call me plain Jack”—had bought some introductory astronomy books to learn more. This proved to be a handy time-filler, as Gordon sat back and let Jack regale him with facts about the stars, and the obligatory reverent awe at the scope of the universe. Jack had a sharp, inquiring mind. He asked penetrating questions. Gordon soon found his own rather elementary knowledge of astronomy was stretched thin. While the women cooked and chattered in the kitchen, Gordon struggled to explain the carbon cycle, supernova explosions, and the riddles of globular clusters. He summoned up smatterings of half-remembered lectures. Jack caught him in a few boners and Gordon began to feel uncomfortable. He thought of Cooper’s exam.

At last they had a beer before lunch and Jack switched to other subjects. Linus Pauling had just won the Nobel Peace Prize: what did Gordon think of that? Wasn’t this the first time anybody had won two Nobels? No, Gordon pointed out, Madame Curie had won one in physics and another in chemistry. Gordon was afraid this would launch them into politics. He was pretty sure Jack was a member of the disarmament-equals-Munich school, pushed locally by William Knowland of the Oakland Trib. But lack adroitly side-stepped the point and ushered them into a steaming lunch of soup and well-marbled minute steaks. Jacaranda trees cloaked a portion of the view from the dining room. The rest of the windows gave a sweeping vista of bay and city and hills. The steak was perfect.

“See?” Penny called. “Ajax knows what you’re going to do before you know yourself.”

Gordon watched. The big horse shivered, snorted, blinked. She took Ajax from a standing position directly into a canter. Ajax bounded forward, puffing, ears pricked. She could get the animal to turn from either foot instantly, and make him walk sideways using only the pressure of her leg. She moved Ajax subtly, coasting around the corral.

Gordon slumped against the railings. Come at it from a different angle. Okay, Ramsey had the biochem part wrapped up. But that was a piece, not the whole puzzle. The only other hard data they had was good old RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2, a drum beat that led nowhere. It had to mean something—

“Gordon! I’m taking Ajax out on a trail ride. Want to come?”

“Uh, okay. No riding, though.”

“Come on.”

He shook his head, distracted. All he could remember now from the previous hour of her instruction was how to avoid getting kicked. When you walked behind him you had to keep close to the rump, so the horse knew there wasn’t room to get in a good healthy whack with his hoof. Brushing the tail apparently told the animal you were not a suitable target to relieve its minor irritations on, and it lost interest. This seemed doubtful to Gordon. It was an animal, after all, incapable of such foresight.

He hiked along the ridge line above her. RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2. They were just below the lip of the Oakland hills. The rumpled brown landscape of Contra Costa County lay in the distance. The redwoods and pines around him were musty with a dry, swarming odor he could not place. 263 KEV PEAK. POINT SOURCE IN TACHYON SPECTRUM. A fine dust rose in puffs to greet his steps. It was late afternoon. Blue shadows lanced through the dusty clouds behind Ajax. Penny had come here every day when she was in high school, Jack told him. Gordon had considered making a wry joke about the Freudian implications of adolescent girls and horseback riding. He decided against it after a glance at Penny. CAN VERIFY WITH NMR. This horsy ambience was far away from the sandlot ball he remembered as his only sport. Clop clop of hooves, images of Gary Cooper or maybe Ida Lupino, a stately glide through aisles of looming redwoods: serene. Gordon felt heavy and conspicuous. He plodded through the woods in black street shoes his mother had bought in Macy’s, unsuited for this distant continent. He felt surrounded here by a naturalness he found foreign. RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2, RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2. Yea verily.

That night, when he made love to her back at the motel, Penny seemed changed. Her hips had got harder. Angular patterns of bone spoke to him through the thin cloak of flesh. She was tough, western, a horsewoman. She knew that artichokes grew on a sort of bush, not on trees. She could cook over an open fire. He found her breasts more pointed, with pronounced nipples, rosy and soft, that puckered swiftly as he sucked on them. The east was east and the west was west.

Jack took them out Sunday in late morning to watch some walnutting he had invested in. In the walnut groves near Alamo a mechanical tree-shaker chuffed and wheezed. Its hydraulic arm yanked at the tree trunks, bringing showers of nuts bursting from the sky. Men shepherded a contraption down the lanes between the trees, coaxing its engine. It flicked rubber flippers to the side, herding the nuts into ragged rows. A picker followed after. The walnuts were still in their dappled green husks and the picker scooped them up, leaving behind the twigs and dirt and snapped branches. Jack explained that this new method would pay off in no time. A trailer carried the nuts to a gauntlet of brushes and wire nets, where the hulls were rubbed off. A natural gas oven baked off any hulls that stuck. “Going to revolutionize the industry,” Jack pronounced. Gordon watched the huffing machines and the gangs of men tending them. They worked even on Sunday; it was harvest. The walnut groves were soothing after the bleak scrub desert of Southern California. The long shadowed ranks of green reminded him of upper New York State. The clanking arm that strangled trees for their nuts was disturbing, though: a new, robot west.

“Can I borrow some of those astronomy books of yours this afternoon?” he asked Jack abruptly.

Jack nodded, surprised, covering it with a baffled grin. Penny rolled her eyes and grimaced: Won’t you ever stop working, even for a weekend? Gordon shrugged, daunted for a moment by her silent condemnation. He saw that she wanted this weekend to work, in some sense. Perhaps he and just plain Jack were supposed to strike up some sudden comradeship. Well, maybe they would, given the right occasion. But this weekend wasn’t it. Gordon knew he had been drifting through it in a daze, distracted by the problem. Yet knowing the fact didn’t change it. And whenever he did join in, he found himself misreading Penny’s parents. He was acutely conscious of sleeping with their daughter. Sticking it to the shiksa, yeah. What was the agreed-upon California way to deal with that fact? Politely ignoring the sleeping arrangements? He supposed so, and yet he still felt uncomfortable.

The tree-shaker grunted and yanked, bringing him out of his ruminations. He had been standing with his hands behind his back, his usual lecturer pose, staring at a clod of earth. Gordon looked up at the others, who had moved off toward the car. Penny gave her father a wry, resigned look, gesturing at Gordon: family signals.

There was nothing in the indexes of Jack’s books about Hercules. Gordon paged through them, looking for something about the constellations. There were star charts, seasonal views of Ursa Major and Orion and the Southern Cross. Students who had been reared under city lights needed a simple guide to the stars. Gordon was no different. He studied the lines connecting the stellar dots, trying to understand why anybody thought these looked like hunters or swans or bulls. Then a passage caught his eye.

Penny drove him over to the Berkeley campus. She had liked the idea of going for a drive around the area again, even though it meant seeing a little less of her parents. Her attitude changed when she saw that he did not want to stroll around the campus at all, and instead headed directly for the Physics Department library. The library was in a building next to the campanile but Gordon refused to ride the elevator up and look at the view. He waved goodbye to her and went inside.

Gordon blinked at the clotted sentences, doing arithmetic in his head. The musty library air carried a heavy, solemn silence. He found a worn copy of Astrophysical Quantities and checked the coordinates again.

He plucked a pencil from his shirt pocket and scribbled beneath it, ignoring the scornful look of a librarian.

He walked out into a cooling autumn afternoon.

On the Air Cal flight to San Diego he said, “The coordinates in the message match the solar apex, that’s the point. To within the uncertainties in the present measurements, I mean.”

“That’s what the plus and minus signs on top of each other mean?” Penny said doubtfully.

“Right. Right.”

“I don’t get it.”

“That’s the direction the sun—and the earth with it—is heading toward.”

“Well, oy veh.”

“Huh?”

“That’s what you say. Indicates surprise. Oy veh.”

“No, it means—well, dismay. Anyway, I don’t say that.”

“Sure you do.”

“No I don’t.”

“Okay, okay. Look, what’s this mean, Gordon?”

“I haven’t got any idea,” he lied.