Timescape

CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

“GORDON, THIS IS CLAUDIA ZINNES. I WANTED TO let you know we lost the anomalous effect this weekend. Did you?”

“I wasn’t running. Sorry.”

“Well, it would have been a waste, anyway. The funny stuff simply faded out.”

“It comes and goes like that a lot.”

“We will continue trying, however.”

“Good, good. So will I.”

Gordon spent an afternoon with star charts, plotting the motion of the point in Hercules. It fell beneath the horizon for a good portion of the day. If there were tachyons—whatever that name meant—they would come directly, on a line between his NMR rig and Hercules. When the earth was between him and Hercules, the particles would probably be absorbed. That meant, to get any signal, he had to run when Hercules was up above the horizon.

“Claudia?”

“Yes, yes, I haven’t called you because we have not seen—”

“I know, I know. Look, those coordinates you and I got. They’re in the constellation Hercules. I think we might have more luck if we only observed at certain times, so—say, have you got a pencil? I just worked these out. I figure between 6 p.m. and—”

But neither Columbia nor La Jolla could pick up any effect at the times he calculated. Could there be some other interference? It would further complicate things, but what was the cause? Gordon went back and estimated the times when he or Cooper had recorded signals. Most of them matched times when Hercules was in the sky. In some cases, though, there was no record of when the observations were made. A few others seemed to correspond to times when Hercules was definitely below the horizon. Gordon had always liked Occam’s Razor: Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. It meant that the simplest theory which explained the data was the best. The interference theory was simple, but it had to take care of the times when Hercules was below the horizon, somehow. Maybe those points were mistakes, and maybe not. Rather than reach any conclusion, Gordon decided to keep trying and let the data sort themselves out.

Gordon had been teaching Classical Electricity and Magnetism, using the standard Jackson text, for only a few weeks. Already his lecture notes were running out and he was behind in grading the problem sets he assigned. The familiar blizzard of demands fell on him: committees; office hours with students; reading over Cooper’s work and talking to him about it; arranging seminars. The first-year graduate class looked good, as far as Gordon could tell from the problem sets they handed in. Burnett and More were sharp. The middle of the pack—Sweedler, Coon, Littenberg particularly—had promise. There were the twins from Oklahoma who did uneven work and had an irritating way of cross-examining him. Maybe he was a little touchy these days, but they—

“Hey, got a minute?”

Gordon looked up from his grading. It was Ramsey. “Sure.”

“Look, I wanted to talk to you about this press conference Hussinger and I are doing.”

“Press conference?”

“Yeah, we’re, ah, going to announce our conclusions. It looks pretty big.” Ramsey stood quietly by the doorway, without his usual animation.

“Well, good. Good.”

“We wanted to use that chain configuration I figured out. You know, the one I thought you and I would publish together.”

“You need to use that?”

“It makes the case stronger, yeah.”

“How will you explain where it comes from?”

Ramsey looked pained. “Yeah, that’s the catch, isn’t it? If I claim it’s from your experiments, some people are going to think the whole idea is bullshit.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“But still, look—” Ramsey spread his hands. “It makes the argument more convincing, to see the structure—”

“No.” Gordon shook his head vigorously. “I’m sure you’ll be believed, solely on the basis of the experiments. It’s not necessary to drag me into it.”

Ramsey looked doubtful. “It’s a nice piece of work, though.”

Gordon smiled. “Leave it out. Leave me out, okay?”

“If you say so, sure. Sure,” Ramsey said, and left.

To Gordon the conversation with Ramsey was amusing, a distant reminder of the real world. To Ramsey and Hussinger, publishing first was the crucial step. Holding a press conference put their seal on the work even more strongly. But Ramsey knew nothing would have happened without Gordon, and the thought bothered the man. Proper procedure was to first get Gordon’s consent to separate publication, and then to write a warm acknowledgment at the end of their paper. Gordon told Penny about the conversation that evening, and about how strange the whole process seemed to him now. It was getting the result that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure. People became scientists because they liked solving riddles, not because they would win prizes. Penny nodded, and remarked that she understood Lakin a little better. He was a man past the point of finding anything truly fundamental; scientific invention normally trickles away past the age of forty. So now Lakin clung to the accolades, the visible talismans of accomplishment. Gordon nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “Lakin’s an operator without real eigenvalues.” It was an obscure physicist’s joke, and Penny didn’t understand it, but Gordon laughed for the first time in days.

“Hey, gee, you’re still here?” Cooper said from the laboratory doorway.

Gordon looked up from an oscilloscope face. “Trying to take some new data, yeah.”

“Crap, it’s late. I mean, I just dropped in after a date to pick up some books and saw the light. You been here since I left for dinner?”

“Uh, yes. I got something out of the vending machines.”

“Geez, that’s terrible food.”

“Right,” Gordon said, turning back to the equipment.

Cooper ambled over and noticed the resonance traces scattered on the lab bench. “Looks like my stuff.”

“Close, yeah.”

“You’re doing indium antimonide? Y’know, Lakin asked me about your taking so much time on the rig here. Wants to know what you’re doin’.”

“Why doesn’t he come ask me?”

A shrug. “Look, I don’t want to get—”

“I know.”

After a few neutral comments, Cooper left. Gordon had been carrying out his normal duties for the last week and then spending the evenings taking data, listening, waiting. There were random yellow jitterings among the traces, but no signal. All eroded into noise. The pumps coughed, the electronics gear gave an occasional hot ping. Tachyons, he thought. Things faster than light. It made no sense. He had taken up the idea with Wong, the particle physicist, and got the conventional reply: they violated special relativity, and anyway, there was no evidence for them. Tachyons, gliding across the universe in less time than Gordon’s eye took to absorb a photon of the pale, watery laboratory light—these things went against reason.

Then there came a flutter of interrupted resonances. Gordon had worked out a faster way of compiling the curves and he could extract the Morse coded portions almost immediately.

A few moments later, another sputter of interruptions:

and then a blur of noise. Gordon nodded to himself. He felt comfortable, working here alone, monklike. Penny didn’t like his long hours here, but that was a secondary issue. She didn’t understand that sometimes you had to press on, that the world would yield if you just kept at it.

When the scope face cleared he took a break. He walked the silent corridors of the physics building to shake off a sleepy daze. Outside Grundkind’s lab was a big sheet of computer paper with a disheartened graduate student’s scrawl at the top:

Gordon smiled. The public thought of science as an absolute, sure thing, money in the bank. They never knew how some slight error could give you wildly wrong results. Below the top scrawl were penciled-in contributions from other students:

He got himself a Hershey bar and went back to the lab.

“Jesus,” Penny said in the morning, “you look like something somebody took out of an old trunk.”

“Yeah, yeah. Got a class next hour. What’s in the larder?”

“Lard, that’s what the fuck’s in the larder—fucking lard.”

“As you’re always putting it, come on”

“Cereal, then.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Two bowls, then.”

“Look, I had to work.”

“Not getting promoted really shook you up, didn’t it?”

“Bull, just bull.”

“Bull, right.”

“I’ve got to find out.”

“That woman, Zinnes. That’s all you needed.”

“For confirmation, yes. But we don’t understand it.”

Gordon rummaged for shredded wheat. He put the toasted rolls into a bowl and threw the packet into the trash. At the bottom of the trash container was an empty half-gallon of Brookside burgundy.

“You staying there tonight?” Penny said.

“Uh, yeah.”

“I got a letter from my mother.”

“Uh huh.”

“They thought you were really pretty weird.”

“They’re right.”

“You might’ve tried.”

“I was trying to do it cool and WASP.”

“Cool and dopey.”

“I didn’t know it was that important.”

“It wasn’t. I just thought.”

“Look, there’ll be other times.”

“You got a call.”

“I mean, maybe around Thanksgiving.”

“Uh huh.”

“San Francisco, we didn’t see much of it.”

“It was from New York.”

He stopped slurping shredded wheat. “What?”

“The call. I gave him your office number.”

“I wasn’t in my office much. Who was it?”

“Didn’t say.”

“You ask?”

“No.”

“Next time, ask.”

“Yessir.”

“Oh crap.”

The San Diego Union headlined VIET REGIME TOPPLED. Gordon looked at the pictures of corpses in the streets and thought about Cliff. The Union said it was a straightforward military coup d’etat. Somebody had caught Ngo Dinh Diem and shot him in the head and that was the end of it. The Kennedy administration said they had nothing to do with it. They deplored the whole thing. On the other hand, they said, maybe this cleared the way for some true progress in the war there. Maybe so, Gordon thought dimly, and threw the paper in the lab trash can.

Claudia Zinnes had picked up some of the same fragments, but not all. The noise level came and went. Gordon wondered if there were some other effect at work, beyond the matter of Hercules being visible. Maybe the beaming of the tachyons was inaccurate. That would explain why the signal came and went. He held these ideas in his head, together with suspicions and hunches. During the long evenings of watching the scope he turned them like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, fitting edges together. His hunch was based on the solar apex number, and it led to a conclusion about the messages that he found difficult to believe. He tried to steer clear of the conclusion. There might easily be another explanation, after all. On the other hand, Wong had mentioned the causality argument against tachyons, so there was at least some crude connection. Occam’s Razor did not seem to be of much use here. The whole thing had an Alice-in-Wonderland quality about it. Which meant, he reminded himself, that it was even more important to stick to the facts, the digits, the hard data. Give me a solid set of numbers and I shall rule the world, he thought to himself, and laughed out loud.

He had dozed. He shook himself and rubbed his eyes. Halfway through the gesture he jerked his hands away and stared at the chart recorder.

Jagged lines. The lyric curves of the resonances were shot through with sudden interruptions.

He fished backward through the spool of tape. If he had missed the key-in point—

But no; there it was. He began to decode.

The clerk peered at him. “Yes, it’s true, we do have free safety deposit boxes. But until the end of the century—!” He raised his eyebrows.

“You offer that, don’t you?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“In a public advertisement.”

“Certainly. However, the intent—”

“Your ad says I get a safety deposit box if I maintain a minimum balance of twenty-five dollars, right?”

“Indeed. But as I was beginning to say, we intend this as an initial offering to encourage clients to set up accounts. The firm certainly does not mean for customers to hold these indefinitely, solely on the strength—”

“Your ad doesn’t quibble the way you do.”

“I don’t think your—”

“I’m right and you know it. You want I should ask for the manager? You’re just starting out here, aren’t you?”

The clerk’s face gave away nothing as he thought. “Well… you do seem to have uncovered an aspect we had not anticipated…”

Gordon grinned. He took the yellow sheet of paper out of an envelope and put it on the desk.