Timescape

CHAPTER FORTY

“HELLO.”

“Gordon? Gordon, is that you?”

“Uncle Herb, ah.” Gordon hesitated and looked at his office telephone receiver in puzzlement, as though his uncle’s voice were out of place here.

“You’re working so hard, you can’t go home at night?”

“Well, you know, some experiments.”

“So the girl said.”

Gordon smiled. Not lady, his usual term. No, Penny was a girl. And his mother had undoubtedly told Uncle Herb what kind of girl.

“I’m calling about your mother.”

“What? Why?”

“She is krank.”

“What? Cronk?”

“Krank, sick. She has been sick for quite a while.”

“Not when I was there.”

“When you were here, too, yes. She was. But for your visit, she did not let on.”

“Good grief. Look, what’s wrong?”

“Something with the pancreas, they said. They’re not sure. These doctors, they never are.”

“She said something about pleurisy, a long time ago—”

“That was it. That was when it started up with her.”

“How bad is it?”

“You know doctors, they don’t say yet. But I think you ought to come home.”

“Uncle Herb, look, I can’t just now.”

“She has started asking about you.”

“Why didn’t she call?”

“You know her, the trouble between you two.”

“We weren’t having any bad trouble.”

“You can’t fool your uncle, Gordon.”

“No, really, I didn’t think it was.”

“She thinks so. I think so, too, but I know you don’t listen to your old dummy uncle’s advice.”

“Look, you’re no dummy. I—”

“Come see her.”

“I have a job, Uncle Herb. Classes to teach. And these experiments now, they’re very important.”

“Your mother, you know she won’t call you, but—”

“I would if I could, and I will, I will as soon as—”

“It’s important to her, Gordon.”

“Where is she now?”

“In the hospital, where else?”

“For what?”

“Some tests,” he admitted.

“Okay, look, I really can’t get away now. But soon. Yes, soon I’ll come.”

“Gordon, I think now.”

“No, look, Uncle Herb, I know how you feel. And I will come. Soon.”

“Soon means when?”

“I’ll call you. Let you know as soon as I can.”

“All right then. Soon. She hasn’t heard from you much lately.”

“Right, I know. Soon. Soon.”

He called his mother, to explain. Her voice was thin and reedy, shrunken by the miles. She seemed in good spirits, though. The doctors were very nice, they treated you with consideration. No, she had no problem with the hospital bills, he was not to worry about that. She played down the idea that he should come see her. He was a professor, he had students, and why spend all that money for only a few days. Come home at Thanksgiving, that would be early enough, that would be fine. Uncle Herb was a little overconcerned, that was all. Gordon said abruptly into the telephone, “Tell him for me, I’m trying to not be a potzer, here. The work is at a crucial point.” His mother paused. Potzer was not really a polite word, too close to putzer. But she let it go. “That he’ll understand. So do I, Gordon. Do your work, yes.”

The university had arranged the press conference for Ramsey and Hussinger. There was a three-man team from the local CBS station, and the journalist who did the A University on Its Way to Greatness feature, as well as San Diego Union and Los Angeles Times men. Gordon stood in the back of the hall. There were slides of the results, pictures of Hussinger beside the testing tanks, graphs of the breakdown in the ocean ecosystems. The audience was impressed. Ramsey fielded questions well. Hussinger—an overweight, balding man with quick, black eyes—spoke with rapid-fire intensity. A reporter asked Ramsey what led him to conjecture that such terrible things could come from such an obscure cause. Ramsey skirted the issue. He glanced at Gordon and then made a vague remark about hunches coming out of nowhere. People you knew or worked with said something and then you put them together, all without really knowing where the initial spark was from. Oh, the reporter asked, was someone else at UCLJ working on things like this? Ramsey looked uneasy. “I don’t think I can say anything about that at this time,” he murmured. Gordon slipped out the back before the conference broke up. Outside, the air seemed smoky. He breathed deeply, felt dizzy, and coughed harshly. The shafts of sunlight had a shifting, watery look.

Hercules fell below the horizon around 9 p.m. now, so Gordon could shut down the rig reasonably early. There was still decoding work to be done, though, if he found any interruptions of the NMR traces. He got home reasonably early most of the time, for about a week. Then the noise level began to rise again. He received sporadic signals. Hercules was in the sky from midmorning until night. He spent the day taking data. Then, after 9 o’clock, he would prepare his lectures and grade papers. He began to stay later and later. Once he slept in his office overnight.

Penny looked up with surprise as he unlocked their front door. “Well, well. Run out of electricity?”

“No. Just finished early, that’s all.”

“Jesus, you look terrible.”

“A little tired.”

“Want some wine?”

“Not Brookside, if that’s what you’re drinking.”

“No, it’s Krug.”

“What was that Brookside doing around here?”

“For cooking.”

“Uh huh.”

He got some wine and some corn chips and sat down at the kitchen table. Penny was grading essays. The radio was blaring AM music. Don’t know much about history. Gordon frowned. Don’t know much biology. “Christ, turn that off.” Don’t know what a slide rule is for. Penny tilted her head to listen. “That’s one of my favorites, Gordon.” But I do know that I love you—

He got up suddenly and savagely snapped the switch over. “Bunch of know-nothing bullshit.”

“It’s a pretty song.”

Gordon made a dry laugh.

“Christ, what’s with you?”

“I just don’t like shit music played decibels too high.”

“I think you’re feeling screwed by the Ramsey and Hussinger thing.”

“No, that’s not it.”

“Well, why not? You let them take all the credit.”

“They deserved it.”

“It wasn’t their idea.”

“They can have it. What I’m working on is a lot bigger than that.”

“If it works out.”

“It’ll work. The signal is coming through better.”

“What does it say?”

“Some biochem stuff. More specs on tachyons.”

“That’s good? I mean, what can you use it for?”

“I’m sure it’s going to fit together, as soon as I get enough pieces. I’ve got to find just one clear statement that confirms my hunch, my guess, and that’ll lock it up.”

“What’s your hunch?”

Gordon shook his head silently.

“Come on. Look, you can tell me.”

“No. Nobody. I’m telling nobody until I’m sure. This whole thing is going to be mine. I don’t want word leaking out before I can nail it for sure.”

“Christ, Gordon, I’m Penny. Remember me?”

“Look, I’m not saying.”

“Goddamn, you’re getting completely screwed up in the head, you know that?”

“If you don’t like it, you can leave me alone.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I will, Gordon. Maybe I will.”

He found himself falling asleep in the day. He would jerk awake before the oscilloscope as though startled by some noise, instantly afraid that he had missed some data.

He taught his Classical Electricity and Magnetism class as though in a dream. He would drift from one blackboard to another, jotting down formulas in what he thought was a neat, readable print. He spoke facing the class, but he gave the impression of carrying on an internal debate with himself. Occasionally, after lecture, he would glance back at the boards before leaving, and be shocked at the cluttered lines of nearly unreadable scribbles.

Lakin avoided talking to Gordon about anything other than routine laboratory operations. Cooper, too, stayed in his small student’s office and seldom sought out Gordon, even when he was blocked on a particular point. Gordon rarely went up to the Physics Department office on the third floor any more. Secretaries had to seek him out in the laboratory. He brought his own lunch in a bag and ate it there, tending the NMR apparatus, fighting the recurring signal/noise problems, watching the jiggling yellow lines of the resonance curves.

“Dr. Bernstein?”

“Huh?” Gordon had been dozing in front of the scope. His eyes darted to the resonance lines, but they were undisturbed. Good; he had missed nothing. Only then did he look up at the slender man who stood inside the laboratory door.

“I’m from UPI. I’m doing a background story on the Ramsey-Hussinger results. They’ve excited an enormous amount of concern, you know. I thought I would look into the contributions made by other faculty to—”

“Why come to me?”

“I could not help but notice that you were the man Professor Ramsey kept looking at during their press conference. I wondered if you might he the ‘other sources’ Professor Ramsey recently admitted—”

“When did he say that?”

“Just yesterday, while I was interviewing him.”

“Shit.”

“What was that. Doctor? You seem rather concerned.”

“No, nothing. Look, I have nothing to say.”

“Are you sure, Doctor?”

“I said I have nothing to say. Now leave, please.”

The man opened his mouth. Gordon jerked his thumb toward the door. “Out, I said. Out”

Gordon worked each day, gradually collecting fragments of sentences. They came out of sequence. The technical information was repetitious, probably to be sure it came through correctly, despite transmission and receiving errors. But why? he thought. This stuff fits my guesses, sure. But there must be an explanation in this text itself. A rational explanation, clearly set out. One evening he had a dream in which Uncle Herb was watching him play chess in Washington Square. His uncle frowned as Gordon moved the pieces across the squares and said over and over, in a disapproving voice, “God forbid there should not be a rational explanation.”

On the morning of Monday, November 5, he drove into work late. He had got into a pointless argument with Penny over minor domestic matters. He turned on the car radio to take his mind off it. The lead news item was that Maria Goeppert Mayer of UCLJ had won the Nobel Prize in physics. Gordon was so stunned by the news he barely recovered in time to make the turn at the top of Torrey Pines Road. A Lincoln blared its horn at him and the driver—a man in a hat driving with his lights on—glared. Mayer had won the prize for the shell model of the nucleus. She shared it with Eugene Wigner of Princeton and Hans Jensen, a German who had devised the shell model at about the same time as Maria.

The University held a press conference that afternoon. Maria Mayer was shy and soft-spoken beneath the barrage of questions. Gordon went to see. The questions asked were mostly dumb, but you expected that. The kindly woman who had stopped to inquire about his results, when the rest of the department was ignoring him, was now a Nobel Prize winner. The fact took a while to sink in. He had a sudden sense that things were converging at this place, this time. The research done here was important. There were the Carroways and their quasar riddle, Gell-Mann’s arrays of particles, Dyson’s visions, Marcuse and Maria Mayer and the news that Jonas Salk was coming to build an institute. La Jolla was a nexus. He was grateful to be here.