Timescape

CHAPTER FORTY ONE

THE SIGNAL STRENGTH GOT ABRUPTLY BETTER. THERE were whole paragraphs about the Wheeler-Feynman theory. Gordon called Claudia Zinnes to see if the Columbia group was getting the same results.

“No, not for five days now,” she said. “First we had some equipment failure. Then the graduate student got the flu—the one that’s been going around. I think he was overtired. Those times you gave us—that’s ten, twelve hours in the lab, Gordon.”

“You mean you have nothing?”

“Not for those days, no.”

“Can’t you do some of the times yourself?”

“I will, starting tomorrow. I do have other things to do, you know.”

“Sure, yes. I want to have some confirmation, that’s all.”

“We have that now, Gordon. Of the effect, I mean.”

“It’s not only the effect that’s important. Claudia, look back over those signals. Think about what it means.”

“Gordon, I don’t think we know enough yet to—”

“Okay, I agree, basically. Most of my data is a jumble. Fragments. Pieces of sentences. Formulas. But there is a consistent feel to it.”

Her voice took on the precise, professional clarity he remembered from graduate school. “First the data, Gordon. Then we indulge in some theory, maybe.”

“Yeah, right.” He knew better than to argue with her on the philosophy of experimental physics. She had rather rigid views.

“I promise you, I start up tomorrow.”

“Okay, but it could fade by then. I mean—”

“Don’t kvetch, Gordon. Tomorrow we start again.”

It came less than three hours later, shortly after noon on Tuesday, November 6. Names, dates. The spreading bloom. The phrases describing this were clipped and tense. Parts were garbled. Letters were missing. One long passage, though, related how the experiments had begun and who was involved. These sentences were longer and more relaxed and almost conversational, as though someone were simply sending what came into his head.

There came a scramble of noise. The long passage disappeared and did not return. The terse biological information reappeared. There were missing words. The noise was rising like a tossing sea. Through the last staccato sentences there ran an unstated sense of desperation.

Penny saw something different in his face when he came into the kitchen. Her raised eyebrows asked a question.

“I got it today.” He surprised himself at the easy, blank way he could say it.

“Got what?”

“The answer, for Chrissake.”

“Oh. Oh.”

Gordon handed her a Xerox copy of his lab notebook. “So it really is the way you thought?”

“Apparently.” There was a quiet assurance in him now. He felt no pressing need to say anything about the result, no tension, not even a hint of the manic elation he had expected. The facts were there at last and they could speak for themselves.

“My God, Gordon.”

“Yeah. My God, indeed.”

There was a moment of silence between them. She put the Xerox page on the kitchen table and turned back to deboning a chicken. “Well, that should take care of your promotion.”

“It sure as hell should,” Gordon said with some relish.

“And maybe—” she gave him a sidelong look—“maybe you’ll be worth living with again.” The sentence had started out all right but by the end a bitter tone came into it. Gordon pursed his lips, irked.

“You haven’t made it any easier.”

“There are limits, Gordon.”

“Uh huh.”

“I’m not your goddam little wifey.”

“Yes, you made that brilliantly clear some time ago.”

She sniffed, lips pressed so tight they grew pale, and wiped her hands on a paper towel. Penny reached over and clicked on the radio. It began playing a Chubby Checker tune Gordon stepped forward and turned it off. She looked at him, saying nothing. Gordon picked up the Xeroxed page and put it in his jacket pocket, carefully folding it beforehand.

He said, “I think I’ll go do some reading.”

“You do that,” she said.

All through the afternoon of November 7 the noise level rose. It blotted out the signal most of the time. Gordon got a few words here and there, and a very clear RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2, and that was all. The coordinates made sense now. Up ahead in the future they would have a precise fix on where they would seem to be in the sky The solar apex was an average of the sun’s motion. Thirty-five years from now the earth would be in a location near the average motion. Gordon felt a certain relaxing in him as he watched the jittering noise. All the pieces fit now. Zinnes could confirm at least part of it. Now the question was how to present the data, how to build an airtight case that couldn’t be dismissed out of hand. A straightforward paper in The Physical Review? That would be the standard approach. The lead time on Phys Rev was at least nine months, though. He could publish in Physical Review Letters, but letters had to be short. How could Tie pack in all the experimental detail, plus the messages? Gordon smiled ruefully. Here he had an enormous result and he was dithering over how to present it. Showbiz.

Penny carried knives and forks to the table; Gordon brought the plates. The slatted blinds let in yellow swords of sun. She moved gracefully in this light, her face pensive.

They ate silently for a moment, both hungry. “I thought about your experiments today,” she began hesitantly.

“Yes?”

“I don’t understand them. To think of time that way…”

“I don’t see how it can make sense, either. It’s a fact, though.”

“And facts rule.”

“Well, sure. I kind of feel we’re looking at this the wrong way, though. Space-time must not work the way physicists think.”

She nodded and pushed potatoes around her plate, still pensive. “Thomas Wolfe. ‘Time, dark time, secret time, forever flowing like a river.’ I remember that from The Web and the Rock”

“Haven’t read it.”

“I looked up a Dobson poem today, thinking about you.” She took a paper from her books and handed it to him.

Time goes, you say? Ah, no!

Alas, time stays, we go.

He laughed. “Yeah, something like that.” He cut into a frankfurter with enthusiasm.

“Do you think people like Lakin are going to keep on questioning your work?”

He chewed judiciously. “Well, in the best sense, I hope they do. Every result in science has to stand up to criticism every day. Results have to be checked and rethought.”

“No, I meant—”

“I know, are they going to try to cut me off at the knees. I hope so.” He grinned. “If they push things further than legitimate scientific skepticism, they’ll have just that much farther to fall.”

“Well, I hope not.”

“Why?”

“Because—” her voice broke—“it’ll be hard on you, and I can’t take what it does to you any more.”

“Honey…”

“I can’t. You’ve been tight as a drum all summer and fall. And when I try to deal with it, I can’t get through to you and I start snapping at you and…”

“Honey…”

“Things get so impossible. I just…”

“God, I know. It runs away with me.”

She said quietly, “And me…”

“I start thinking about a problem and other things, other people, they just seem to get in the way.”

“It’s been my fault, too. I want a lot out of this, out of us, so much, and I’m not getting it.”

“We’ve been clawing at each other.”

She sighed. “Yeah.”

“I… I think the physics stuff isn’t going to be so bad from now on.”

“That… that’s what I hope. I mean, these last few days, they’ve been different. Better. It feels like a year ago, really. You’re relaxed, I’m not bugging you all the time to… I feel better about us. For the first time in ages.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” He smiled tentatively.

They ate in a comfortable silence. In the moist sunset glow Penny swirled her glass of white wine and gazed at the ceiling, thinking. Gordon knew they had made an unspoken pledge.

Penny began to smile, her eyes hazed. She sipped more of the amber wine and plunged a fork into a frankfurter. Holding it aloft with a wise smile, she turned it this way and that, studying it critically. “Yours is bigger than this,” she said judicially.

Gordon nodded solemnly. “Maybe. That’s, what, about thirty centimeters? Yeah, I can beat that.”

“In matters of this kind, the preferred unit system is inches. It’s sort of traditional.”

“So it is.”

“Not that I’m a purist, you understand.”

“Oh no, I wouldn’t think that.”

He awoke with an arm that had gone to sleep. He gently rolled her head off his bicep and lay still, feeling the tingling’ ebb away. Outside, the balmy fall night had descended. He sat up slowly and she snuggled to him, murmuring. He studied the rounded knuckles of her curved spine, knobbed hills amid the brown sweep of skin. He thought of time that could flow and loop back on itself, unlike any river, and his eyes followed the narrowing of her back. Then came the flaring into hips, a complex of smooth surfaces descending to the ripe swelling below, the tan fading into a startling pure white. Drowsy, she had solemnly informed him that Lawrence had called his a pillar of blood, a phrase that struck her as grotesque. But on the other hand, she added, it was sort of like that, wasn’t it? “All in pursuit of la petite mort,” she murmured, and slid into sleep. Gordon knew she had been right about the tension between them. It was seeping away now. He saw that he had loved her all along, but there had been so much in the way…

He heard a distant siren. Something made him slowly untangle himself from her. He moved across the cold floor to the window. He could see people walking along La Jolla Boulevard under a bleached neon glow. A motorcycle cop raced by. The police here were jackbooted and military, with eggshell helmets, goggles, their square faces a frozen blank, like actors in a futuristic anticipation, a B-grade black and white. In New York the cops were soft, their uniforms a worn, neighborhood blue. The siren shrieked. A police car flashed by. Buildings, palms, turning heads, shops and signs—all pulsed red in response to the revolving hysterical light atop the streaking car. Fragments of red ricocheted from store windows. Kinetic confusion swept by, wailing, its mechanical mouth announcing tumult. The Doppler death of this shriek stirred pedestrians, filling their steps with new energy. Heads pivoted to seek the crime or fire that had drawn the bulletlike car. Gordon thought of the messages and the thin thread of desperation that ran through them. A siren. It had come in speckled dabs, impulses, light reflected from random waves, visions from far across a river. It should be answered. For scientific reasons, yes, but for more than that.

“Uh, you busy?”

It was Cooper. “No, come on in.” Gordon pushed the pile of papers he was grading to the corner of his desk. Then he leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on top of them. He clasped his hands behind his neck, elbows out, and grinned. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, I’m gonna take my exam again in three weeks, y’know. What do I say about those interruptions? I mean, Lakin and the others came down on me like a shitload of bricks last time.”

“Right. If I were you, I would ignore the point.”

“But I can’t They’ll cream me again.”

“I’ll take care of them.”

“Huh? How?”

“I’ll have a little work of my own to present, by that time.”

“Well, I dunno… Getting Lakin off my back is nontrivial. You saw the way he—”

“Why do you say ‘nontrivial’? Why not ‘hard’ or ‘difficult’?”

“Well, you know, it’s physics talk…”

“Yes, ‘physics talk,’ We have a lot of jargon like that. I wonder if sometimes it doesn’t disguise things, rather than making them clearer.”

Cooper gave Gordon an odd look. “I guess.”

“Don’t look so uncertain,” Gordon said jovially. “You’re home free. I’m going to save your ass.”

“Uh, okay.” Cooper moved uncertainly to the door. “If you say so…”

“See you on the ramparts,” Gordon said by way of dismissal.

He was about a quarter of the way through the first draft of his paper for Science when there was a knock on his door. He had decided on Science because it was big and prestigious and got things into print fairly quickly. They carried long articles, so he could tell the whole thing in one piece, stacking up the evidence in a pile so high no one could knock it down. He had already checked with Claudia Zinnes. She would publish a letter in the same issue, confirming some or his observations.

“Hello. Can we come in?” It was the twins, first-year graduate students.

“Well, look, I’m pretty busy—”

“It’s your office hours.”

“It is? Oh yes. Well, what did you want?”

“You graded some of our problems wrong,” one of them said. The flat statement took Gordon aback. He was used to a little more humility from students. “Oh?” he countered.

“Yeah. Look—” One of them began to write rapidly on Gordon’s blackboard, covering up some notes Gordon had put there while he was outlining his paper. Gordon tried to follow the argument the twin was making. “Careful of that stuff I have written there.” The twin frowned at Gordon’s intruding lines. “Okay,” he said democratically, and began to write around them. Gordon focused his attention on the rapid-fire sentences about Bessel’s functions and boundary conditions on the electric field. It took him five minutes to straighten out the twin’s misconception. All through it he was never sure which one of the twins he was talking to. They were virtually carbon copies. As soon as one finished the other would leap to the attack with a new objection, usually phrased in a cryptic few words. Gordon found them exceptionally tiring. After ten more minutes, during which they began to interrogate him about his research and how much money a research assistant made, he finally got rid of them by pleading a headache. That, plus three significant glances at his watch, got them out the door. As he was closing it, another voice called, “Wait a sec! Dr. Bernstein!”

Gordon reluctantly opened it. The man from UPI stepped partway in. “I know you don’t want to be bothered, Professor—”

“Right. So why are you bothering me?”

“Because Professor Ramsey blew the story to me, just now. That’s why.”

“What story?”

“About you and those chain molecules. Where you got the picture in the first place. How you wanted it kept secret. I’ve got it all, the works.” The man beamed at him.

“Why did Ramsey tell you?”

“I worked out some of it. He didn’t paper over the seams in his story very well. Not a very good liar, Ramsey.”

“I suppose not.”

“He wasn’t going to tell me anything. But I remembered that thing you were involved in a while back.”

Gordon said with sudden fatigue, “Saul Shriffer.”

“Yeah, he’s the guy. Me, I put two and two together. I went to see Ramsey for some more backgrounding and in the middle of it I popped him with that one.”

“And he babbled like a brook.”

“You got it.”

Gordon sagged into his chair. He sat there, slumped down, staring at the man from United Press International.

“Well?” the man said. He took out a notebook. “You going to tell me, Professor?”

“I don’t appreciate being grilled.”

“Sorry if I offended you, Professor. I’m not grilling you. I just did a little sniffing around and—”

“Okay, okay, I’m sensitive about that.”

“It’s going to come out sometime, you know. The Ramsey-Hussinger thing hasn’t got any real attention in the papers so far, I know. But it’s going to be important. People are going to hear about it. Your part could be valuable.”

In a dreamy way Gordon began to laugh softly. “Could be valuable…” he said, and laughed again.

The man frowned. “Hey, look, you are going to tell me, aren’t you?”

Gordon felt an odd, seeping tiredness in himself. He sighed. “I… I suppose I am.”