Timescape

CHAPTER FORTY SIX

HE WALKED FROM HIS HOTEL ON CONNECTICUT AVENUE. The reception was to be a buffet lunch, the letter said, so Gordon had slept in until eleven. He had long ago learned that on short trips to the east it was best to grant nothing to the myth of time zones, and keep to his western schedule. Invariably this fit the demands on an out-of-town visitor anyway, since such occasions were excuses for lingering over sauce-drenched entrees in expensive restaurants, followed by earnest, now-that-we’re-away-from-the-office-I-can-speak-frankly revelations over several cups of coffee, and then late night stumblings-to-bed. Arising at ten the next morning seldom got him to the NSF or AEC later than the executives themselves, since he ate no breakfast.

He tramped through the city zoo; it was more or less along the way. Yellow canine eyes followed him, contemplating the results if the bars were suddenly lifted. Chimps swung in pendulum strokes on an unending circuit of their cramped universe. The natural world was a pocket here amid distant honks and looming, square profiles of sour brown brick. Gordon savored the clammy fullness of the breeze that had tunneled its way up from the Potomac. He welcomed this traveler’s brush with the seasons, punctuations to the extended sentences of the months, a welcome relief from California’s monotonous excellence.

He had first come here with his mother and father. That tourist’s orbit was now a dim set of memories from a corner of his preadolescence, the period of life that he supposed was everybody’s golden age. He remembered being awed at the sleek white glow of the Washington Monument and the White House. For years afterward he was certain these solemn edifices were what was meant when his grammar school class sang “America” and chorused about alabaster majesties. “The country, it really begins in Washington,” his mother had said, not forgetting to add the pedagogical “D.C.,” so that her son would never confuse it with the state. And Gordon, towed through the list of historic shrines, saw what she meant. Beyond the Frenchified design of the city center lay a rural park, land that breathed of Jefferson and tree-traced boulevards. To him Washington had ever since been the entranceway to a vast republic where crops sprouted under a WASP sun. There, blue-eyed blonds drove yellow roadsters that left dust plumes on the open roads as they roared from one country fair to the next, women won prizes for strawberry preserves and men drank watery beer and kissed girls who had been struck from the template of Doris Day. He had gazed upward at the Spirit of St. Louis hanging like a paralyzed moth in the Smithsonian, and wondered how a cornhusker city—“without a single good college in it,” his mother sniffed—could flap wings and scoot aloft.

Gordon thrust his hands into his pockets for warmth and walked. The corners of his mouth perked up in an airy mirth. He had learned a lot about the huge Country beyond Washington, most of it from Penny. Their mutual abrasions had healed over in the aftermath of 1963 and they had found again the persistent chemistry that had first drawn them into their mutual bound orbits, circles centered on a point midway between them. The thing between them was not a geometric dot but rather a small sun, igniting between them a passion Gordon felt was deeper than anything that had happened to him before. They were married in late 1964. Her father, just plain Jack, put on a massive wedding, glittery and champagne-steeped. Penny wore the traditional white. She made a downward-turning leer whenever anyone mentioned it. She had come with him to Washington that winter, when he was making his first big presentation to the NSF for a major grant of his own. His talk went well and Penny fell in love with the National Gallery, going every day to see the Vermeers. Together they ate shellfish with luminaries from the NSF and strolled down from the Congressional dome to the Lincoln Monument. They did not mind the raw, cold damp then; it went with the scenery. Everything had seemed to go with everything else.

Gordon checked the address and found that he had another block to go. He had always been intrigued by the contrasts of Washington. This busy street brimmed with its own importance, yet intersecting it were thinner avenues of small shops, decaying houses, and corner grocery stores. Old black men leaned in doorways, their large brown eyes surveying the tax-funded bustle. Gordon waved to one and, turning a corner, discovered a mammoth courtyard. It had the austere French style of 1950s Government Classical, with conical evergreens standing like sentries at the abrupt, uncompromising corners. Regimented bushes led the eye, willing or not, into remorseless perspectives.

Well, he thought, blocky and self-important architecture or no, this was it. He teetered back on his heels to look. Granite facings led upward into a bland sky. He took his hands out of his pockets and brushed hair back from his eyes. Already there was the giveaway thinning of the crown, he knew, sure sign that his father’s baldness would find echo in his own forties.

He pushed open a series of three glass doors. The spaces between seemed to serve as air locks, preserving inside a dry heat. Ahead were tables with luxuriant linen draped over them. In the center of the carpeted foyer, knots of suited men. Gordon pushed through the last air lock and into a hushed buzz of talk. Thick drapes swallowed sounds, giving the air a solemnity found in mortuaries. To the left, a band of receptionists. One detached herself and came toward him. She was wearing a long, cream-colored silky thing Gordon would have taken for an evening gown if it were not midday. She asked for his name. He gave it slowly. “Oh,” she said, eyes round, and went to one of the draped tables. She returned with a name tag, not the usual plastic, but a sturdy wooden frame housing a stark white board with his name in calligraphy. She pinned it on him. “We do want our guests to look their best today,” she said with abstract concern, and brushed imaginary lint from his coat sleeve. Gordon warmed at the attention and forgave her efficient gloss. Other men, all suited, most in basic bureaucratic black, were filling the foyer. The receptionists met them with a volley of name tags—plastic, he noted—and seating assignments and admission cards. In a corner a woman who looked like an executive secretary helped a frail white-haired man from his immense, weighty overcoat. He moved with delicate, hesitant gestures, and Gordon recognized him as Jules Chardaman, the nuclear physicist who had discovered some particle or other and received a Nobel for his trouble. I thought he was dead, Gordon mused.

“Gordon! Tried to call you last night,” called a brisk voice behind him.

He turned, hesitated, and shook hands with Saul Shriffer. “I got in late and went out for a walk.”

“In this town?”

“It seemed safe.”

Saul shook his head. “Maybe they don’t mug dreamers.”

“I probably don’t look prosperous enough.”

Saul flashed his nationally known smile. “Naw, you’re looking great. Hey, how’s the wife? She with you?”

“Oh, she’s fine. She’s been visiting her parents—you know, showing off the kids. She’s flying in this morning, though.” He glanced at his watch. “Should be here soon.”

“Hey, great, like to see her again. How about dinner tonight?”

“Sorry, we’ve got plans.” Gordon realized he had said this too quickly and added, “Maybe tomorrow, though. How long will you be in town?”

“I have to zip over to New York by noon. I’ll catch you next time I’m on the coast.”

“Fine.”

Saul unconsciously pursed his lips, as though considering how to put his next sentence. “You know, those parts of the old messages you kept to yourself…”

Gordon kept his face blank. “Just the names, that’s all. My public statement is that they were lost in the noise. Which is partly true.”

“Yeah.” Saul studied his face. “Look, after all this much time, it seems to me—look, it would make a really interesting sidelight on the whole thing.”

“No. Come on, Saul, we’ve had this discussion before.”

“It’s been years. I fail to see—”

“I’m not sure I got the names right. A letter here and there and you’ve got the wrong name and the wrong people.”

“But look—”

“Forget it. I’m never going to release the parts I’m not sure about.” Gordon smiled to take the edge off his voice. There are other reasons, too, but he wasn’t going to go into that.

Saul shrugged goodnaturedly and fingered his newly grown moustache. “Okay, okay. Just thought I’d give it a try, catch you in a mellow mood. How’re the experiments going?”

“We’re still hammering away at the sensitivity. You know how it is.”

“Getting any signals?”

“Can’t say. The hash is unbelievable.”

Saul frowned. “There should be something there.”

“Oh, there is.”

“No, I mean besides that stuff you got back in ’67. I’ll grant you that was a clear message. But it wasn’t in any code or language we know.”

“The universe is a big place.”

“You think they were from a long way off?”

“Look, anything I say is pure guess. But it was a strong signal, tightly beamed. We were able to show that the fact that it lasted three days and then shut off was due to the earth passing through a tachyon beam. I’d say we just got in the way of somebody else’s communications net.”

“Ummm.” Saul pondered this. “Y’know, if we could only be sure those messages we can’t decode weren’t from a human transmitter, far up in the future…”

Gordon grinned. Saul was one of the biggest names in science now, at least in the public eye. His popularizations made the bestseller lists, his television series ran in prime time. Gordon finished for him, “You mean, we’d have proof of an alien technology.”

“Sure. Worth trying, isn’t it?”

“Maybe so.”

The big bronze doors at the end of the foyer swung back. The crowd shuffled toward the reception room beyond. Gordon had noted that people in groups move as though by a slow diffusion process, and this mob was no different. Many he knew—Chet Manahan, a methodical solid state physicist who always wore a vest with matching tie, spoke five languages, and made sure you knew this within a few minutes of meeting him; Sidney Roman, a swarthy, delicate, thin man whose precise equations led to outrageous conclusions, some of which had proved right; Louisa Schwartz, who, contrary to her name, had luminous white skin and a mind that catalogued everything in astrophysics, including most of the unprintable gossip; George Maklin, red-faced and loud, shoulders rippling with muscle, who carried out experiments suspended by whiskers into liquid helium, measuring wisps of momentum; Douglas Karp, a czar of a rabble of graduate students which cranked out two papers a month on the band structure of assorted solids, enabling him to lecture in sunny summer schools in the Mediterranean; Brian Nantes, with enormous, booming energy which in his papers squeezed into adroit, laconic equations, denuded of commentary or argument with his contemporaries, with a decidedly pearls-before-swine abstract to accompany the text—and many more, some casually met at conferences, others opposed in heated sessions of APS meetings, most of them dim faces associated with the stutter of initials beneath interesting papers, or met at a sandwich-and-beer faculty lunch just before delivering a seminar, or seen receiving polite applause at a meeting after they had mumbled an invited paper into a microphone. In this pack Saul drifted away, halfway through describing a plan to ferret out extraterrestrials by the squiggles and beeps in the tachyon spectrum. Gordon could do the observations, see, and Saul would look at the data and see what they meant.

Gordon wormed away diagonally, letting a rapidly talking clump of particle physicists come between him and Saul. The buffet lunch lay dead ahead of him. Characteristically, the scientists wasted no time politely hanging back from the self-serve table. Gordon piled beef on bread and escaped with a presentable sandwich. He bit in. The sting of the horseradish cleared his sinuses, watering his eyes. The punch was a superior grade of champagne diluted with pungent orange juice.

Shriffer was surrounded now by a crescent of approving faces. It was odd, how celebrity invaded science these days, so that appearing on the Johnny Carson show was more effective with the NSF than publishing a brilliant series of papers in Physical Review.

Yet in the end it was media fixation that had done it all, Gordon reflected. At the conclusion of the press conference of Ramsey and Hussinger, Gordon had felt the constricting heat flow through him and seem to wash through the air. Then, watching Cronkite talk grimly into the camera on November 22, he had felt it again. Was that the signature of a true, unavoidable paradox? Was that when the future had radically altered? There was no way to tell, at least not yet. He had pored over records of atmospheric phenomena, of cosmic ray counts, of radio noise and starlight fluence—and found nothing. There were no instruments yet designed which could measure the effect. Gordon felt, though, that he had a subjective perception of when it had happened. Perhaps because he was close to the site where the paradoxes were driven home? Or because he was already strung out, as Penny would’ve put it, that is, fine-tuned? He might never know.

A passing face nodded. “Quite a day,” Isaac Lakin said formally, and moved on. Gordon nodded. The remark was suitably ambiguous. Lakin had become a director at the NSF, shepherding the magnetic resonance work. Gordon’s controversial area, tachyon detection, was under another man. Lakin was now best known for his coauthorship of the “spontaneous resonance” paper in PRL. The refracted fame had lifted him, agreeably buoyant, into his present position.

The other coauthor, Cooper, had done reasonably well, too. His thesis went through the committee with slick speed, once stripped of the spontaneous resonance effects. He had gone off to Penn State with evident relief. There, postdoccing his way through some respectable electron spin work led to a faculty position. He was now safely worrying various III-V compounds into yielding up their transport coefficients. Gordon saw him at meetings and they had an occasional drink together, sharing wary conversation.

He eavesdropped on gossip about revival of the Orion spaceship idea, and new work by Dyson. Then, as Gordon was fetching another sandwich and talking to a reporter, a particle physicist approached. He wanted to talk over plans for a new accelerator which had a chance of producing a tachyon cascade. The energy required was enormous. Gordon listened politely. When a revealing skeptical smile began to spread over his face, he forced his lips back into an expression of professorial consideration. The high-energy types were struggling to make tachyons now, but most outside observers felt the effort was premature. Better theory was needed. Gordon had chaired several panels on the subject and had grown thick-skinned about new, big-money proposals. The particle physicists were addicted to their immense accelerators. The man who has only a hammer to work with finds that every new problem needs a nail.

Gordon nodded, looked sage, sipped champagne, said little. Though the evidence for tachyons was now overwhelming, they did not fit into the standard ongoing program of physics. They were more than simply a new species of particle. They couldn’t be put on the shelf beside the mesons and hyperons and kaons. Before this physicists had, with the instincts of accountants, decomposed the world into a comfortable zoology. The other, simpler particles had only minor differences. They fit into the universe like marbles in a sack, filling but not altering the fabric. Tachyons didn’t. They made new theories possible, kicking up the dust of cosmological questions by their mere existence. The implications were being worked out.

Beyond that, though, were the messages themselves. They had ceased in 1963, before Zinnes could get extensive confirmation. Some physicists thought they were real. Others, forever wary of sporadic phenomena, thought they must have been some fortuitous error. The situation had a lot in common with Joe Weber’s detection of gravitational waves in 1969. Later experiments by others had found no waves. Did that mean Weber was wrong, or that the waves came in occasional bursts? It might be decades before another flurry could settle the question. Gordon had talked to Weber, and the wiry, silver-maned experimenter seemed to take the whole thing as a kind of inevitable comedy. In science you usually can’t convert your opponents, he had said; you have to outlive them. For Weber there was hope; Gordon felt his own case was forever uncheckable.

The new theory by Tanninger certainly pointed the way. Tanninger had put tachyons into the general relativity theory in a highly original way. The old question that came up in quantum mechanics, of who the observer was, had finally been resolved. Tachyons were a new kind of wave phenomenon, causality waves looping between past and future, and the paradoxes they could produce gave a new kind of physics. The essence of paradox was the possibility of mutually contradictory outcomes, and Tanninger’s picture of the causal loop was like that of the quantum-mechanical waves. The difference came in the interpretation of the experiment. In Tanninger’s picture, a kind of wave function, resembling the old quantum function, gave the various outcomes of the paradox loop. But the new wave function did not describe probabilities—it spoke of different universes. When a loop was set up, the universe split into two new universes. If the loop was of the simple killing-your-grandfather type, then there would result one universe where the grandfather lived and the grandson disappeared. The grandson reappeared in a second universe, having traveled back in time, where he shot his grandfather and lived out his life, passing through the years which were forever altered by his act. No one in either universe thought the world was paradoxical.

All this came from using tachyons to produce the standing-wave kind of time loop. Without tachyons, no splitting info different universes occurred. Thus the future world that had sent Gordon the messages was gone, unreachable. They had separated sometime in the fall of 1963; Gordon was sure of that. Some event had made Renfrew’s experiment impossible or unnecessary. It could have been the Ramsey-Hussinger press conference, or putting the message in the safety deposit box, or the Kennedy thing. One of those, yes. But which?

He moved among the crowd, greeting friends, letting his mind drift. He recalled that a human being, eating and moving around, gave off 200 watts of body heat. This room trapped most of it, bringing prickly perspiration to his brow. His Adam’s apple snagged on the knot of his tie.

“Gordon!” a silvery voice called to him above the tangle of talk. He turned. Marsha threaded her way through the crowd. He bent and kissed her. She was toting an overnight case, swinging it with abandon as she turned to call hellos to people she knew. She told him about the crush of traffic getting into town after her shuttle flight from LaGuardia, eyebrows darting upward to underline a word, hands describing averted collisions with swooping arcs. The prospect of a few days of freedom from the children gave her a manic, gay air that spread to Gordon. He realized he had grown somber as this overheated, glittery reception went on, and Marsha had erased that in a moment. It was this quality in her, of swelling life, that he remembered best when he was away from her. “Oh, God, there’s that Lakin,” she said, eyes rolling up in a parody of panic. “Let’s move the opposite way, I don’t want to start off with him.” Wifely loyalty. She tugged him to the shrimp salad, which he had passed over, probably following instinctively a genetically ingrained dietary axiom. Marsha snared a few of their friends along the way—to form a protective barrier against Lakin, she said. All this was done with comic exaggeration, drawing chuckles from the somber faces. A waiter sought them out and delivered glasses of champagne. “Ummm, I’ll bet this isn’t what’s in the bowl over there,” Marsha said, sipping, lips puckered in approval. The waiter hesitated, then agreed, “The Chairman said to bring out some of the private stock,” and then was gone, fearing he had revealed too much. Marsha seemed to polarize the medium, Gordon noted, drawing friends out of corners of the large room to form a cloud around them. Carroway appeared, shaking hands, chuckling. Gordon basked in her compact energy. He had never been able to relax so with Penny, he remembered, and maybe that should have told him something from the start. In 1968, when they were in the thick of their last elaborate sparring, he and Penny had come to Washington in winter again. It was a veiled city. Fog rose from the Potomac’s shifting currents. He had avoided dinner parties with physicists that trip, he recalled, mostly because Penny found them boring and he could not predict when she would get into one of her political arguments or, worse, descend into a swollen silence. They had areas they had silently agreed not to talk about, areas which expanded in time. Each had axes to grind—you’re an injustice collector, Penny had accused, once—but, perversely, the good periods between the bad had become radiant with a released energy. He had oscillated in mood through 1967 and ’68, not buying Penny’s Freud-steeped recipes for repair, but discovering no alternative. Isn’t it a little obvious to be so hostile to analysis? she said once, and he had realized it was so; he felt the clanky, machinelike language was a betrayal, a trap. Psychology had modeled itself after the hard sciences, with physics as the shining example. But they had taken the old Newtonian clockwork as their example. To modern physics there was no ticktock world independent of the observer, no untouched mechanism, no way of describing a system without being involved in it. His intuition told him that no such exterior analysis could capture what rubbed and chafed between them. And so, in the descending days of 1968 his personal nucleus had fissioned, and a year later he met Marsha Gould from the Bronx, Marsha, short and dusky, and some inevitable paradigm had come home. Remembering the events now, seeing them sealed in amber, he smiled as Marsha brimmed beside him.

The western windows of the long room now let in a light like beaten brass. Luminaries from the funding agencies were arriving, customarily late. Gordon nodded, shook hands, made appropriate small talk. Into Marsha’s crescent of conversation came Ramsey, smoking a thin cigar. Gordon greeted him with a conspiratorial wink. Then a face said, “I wanted to meet you, so I’m afraid I just plain gatecrashed.” Gordon smiled without interest, bound up in his own recollections, and then noticed the young man’s self-lettered name badge: Gregory Markham. He froze, hand hanging in midair. The surrounding chatter faded and he could distinctly feel his heart thumping. He said stupidly, “I, ah, see.”

“I did my thesis in plasma physics, but I’ve been reading Tanninger’s papers, and yours of course, and, well, I think that’s where the real physics is going to be done. I mean there’s a whole set of cosmological consequences, don’t you think? It seems to me—” and Markham, who Gordon saw was really only a decade or so younger than he, was off, sketching ideas he had about Tanninger’s work. Markham had some interesting notions about the nonlinear solutions, ideas Gordon had not heard before. Despite his shock, he found himself following the technical parts with interest. He could tell Markham had the right feel for the work. Tanninger’s use of the new calculus of exterior differential forms had made his ideas difficult for the older generation of physicists to approach, but to Markham it presented no problem; he was not hobbled by the more accepted, gnarled notation. The essential images conjured up in the mind’s eye, of paradoxical curves descending with elliptic logic to the plane of physical reality, Markham had mastered. Gordon found himself becoming excited; he yearned for a place to sit down and scribble out some arguments of his own, to let the impacted symbols of mathematics speak for him. But then an aide approached, wearing white gloves, and intruded, nodding respectfully but firmly and saying, “Dr. Bernstein, Mrs. Bernstein, we require your presence now.” Markham shrugged and grinned lopsidedly and in what seemed an instant was gone among the crowd. Gordon collected himself and took Marsha’s arm. The aide cleared a path for them. Gordon had an impulse to call out to Markham, find him, ask him to dinner that evening, not let the man slip away. But something held him back. He wondered if this event itself, this chance meeting, could have been the thing that framed the paradoxes—but no, that made no sense, the break had come in 1963, of course, yes. This Markham was not the man who would calculate and argue in that distant Cambridge. The Markham he had just seen would not die in a plane accident. The future would be different.

A puzzled expression flickered across his face and he moved woodenly.

They met the Secretary for Health, Education & Welfare, a man with a tapered nose and a tight, pouting mouth, the two forming a fleshy exclamation point. The aide ushered them all into a small private elevator, where they stood uncomfortably close to each other—inside our personal boundary spaces, Gordon observed abstractedly—and the Secretary for HEW emitted boisterous one-liners, all shaped with a speech writer’s gloss. Gordon recalled that this particular Cabinet appointment had been a highly political one. The elevator slid open to reveal a pinched passageway packed with unmoving people. Several men gave them an obvious once-over and then their eyes went neutral again, heads routinely swiveling back to assigned directions. Security, Gordon supposed. The Secretary led them through a narrow channel and into a larger room. A short woman came bustling over, dressed as though about to go to the opera. She looked like the sort who habitually put her hands up to her string of pearls and took a deep breath before speaking. As Gordon was framing this thought she did precisely that, saying, “The auditorium is filled already, we never thought there would be so many, so early. I don’t think there is any point Mr. Secretary in staying back here just through that way everybody’s out there already almost.”

The Secretary moved forward. Marsha put a hand on Gordon’s shoulder and reached up. “Your tie’s too tight. You look like you’re trying to strangle yourself.” She loosened the knot with deft fingers, smoothed it out. Her teeth bit into her lower lip in her concentration, pressing until the red flesh was pale beneath the slick finish of lipstick. He remembered the way the beach turned white beneath his feet as he ran on it.

“Come. Come,” the pearled lady urged them. They walked across a stark, marbled wedge of space and abruptly onto a stage. Spotlighted figures milled about. Chairs scraped. Another aide in the absurd white gloves took Marsha’s arm. He led the two of them into the glare. There were three rows of chairs, most already occupied. Marsha was at the far end of the front row and Gordon next to her. The aide saw that Marsha negotiated a safe landing. Gordon plunked himself down. The aide evaporated. Marsha was wearing a dress of fashionable shortness. Her efforts to pull the hem down over the curve of her knees caught his attention. He was filled with an agreeable sense of ownership, that the luxuriant curve of thigh so concealed in public was his, could be his for the cost of a wordless gesture tonight.

He squinted to see past the battery of lights. A curving crowd of faces swam in the half-space beyond the stage. They rustled with anticipation—not for him, he knew—and to the left a TV camera peered in cyclopean stupor at the vacant dais. A sound engineer tested the mikes.

Gordon searched the faces he could see. Was Markham out there? He trolled for the right combination of features. It had struck him how alike most people were, despite their vaunted individuality, and yet how quickly the eye could cut through the similarities to pick out the small details that separated known from stranger. Someone caught his eye. He peered through the glare. No, it was Shriffer. Gordon wondered with amusement what Saul would think if he knew Markham was probably only meters away, an unknowing link to the lost world of the messages. Gordon would never reveal those distant names now. It would get into the press and confuse everything, prove nothing.

It was not only keeping the identities secret that made him slow to publish his full data. Most of what he had thought was noise in his earlier experiments was actually indecipherable signals. Those messages fled backward in time from some unfathomable future. They were scarcely absorbed at all by the present rather low-density distribution of matter in the universe. But as they ran backward, what was to men an expanding universe appeared to the tachyons as a contracting one. Galaxies drew together, packing into an ever-shrinking volume. This thicker matter absorbed tachyons better. As they flowed back into what was, to them, an imploding universe, increasing numbers of the tachyons were absorbed. Finally, at the last instant before it compressed to a point, the universe absorbed all tachyons from each point in its own future. Gordon’s measurement of the tachyon flux, integrated back in time, showed that the energy absorbed from the tachyons was enough to heat the compressed mass. This energy fueled the universal expansion. So to the eyes of men, the universe exploded from a single point because of what would happen, not what had. Origin and destiny intertwined. The snake ate its tail.

Gordon wanted to be absolutely sure before he reported on the flux and his conclusions. He was sure it would not be well received.

The world did not want paradox. The reminder that time’s vast movements were loops we could not perceive—the mind veered from that. At least part of the scientific opposition to the messages was based on precisely that flat fact, he was sure. Animals had evolved in such a way that the ways of nature seemed simple to them; that was a definite survival trait. The laws had shaped man, not the other way around. The cortex did not like a universe that fundamentally ran both forward and back.

So he would not smudge the issue with a few tattered names, not for Shriffer’s spotlight. Perhaps he would tell Markham, just as he would inevitably publish the faint calls he had measured from Epsilon Eridani, eleven light years away. They were voices from an undated future, reporting shipboard maintenance details. No paradoxes there. Unless, of course, the information blunted the leap into rocketry now underway, aborted the upcoming space station by some contrary twist. That was always possible, he supposed. Then the universe would split again. The river would fork. But perhaps, when this was all understood and Tanninger’s squiggles cut deeper into the riddle, they would know whether paradoxes should be avoided at all. Paradoxes did no true damage, after all. It was like having a dusky twin beyond the looking glass, identical but for his lefthandedness. And the nature of the tachyons made accidental paradox unlikely, anyway. A starship reporting back to its Earth would use tight beams. No fringing fields would by chance catch the present Earth on its helical whirl through space, intersect its gavotte around the galaxy.

Ramsey moved across his field of vision and jerked him back into this illuminated moment. Ramsey stubbed out his smoke, the slim cigar twisting like a dying insect. The man was nervous. Suddenly, a blare of recorded music. Hail to the Chief. Everyone on the stage stood, belying the fact that the man who entered from the right, smiling and waving a casual hand, was a public servant. President Scranton shook the Secretary’s hand with media-sharpened warmth and took in the rest of the stage with a generalized smile. Despite himself, Gordon felt a certain zest. The President moved with a comfortable certainty, acknowledging the cheers and finally sitting beside the Secretary. Scranton had discredited Robert Kennedy, tripping the scowling younger brother in a tangle of Democratic wiretapping, and then the use of the intelligence community and the FBI against the Republicans. Gordon had found the charges difficult to believe at the time, particularly since Goldwater had uncovered the first hints. But in retrospect it was good to be rid of the Kennedy dynasty idea, and the Imperial Presidency along with it.

The Secretary was at the dais now, making the mechanical introductions and slipping in the obligatory puffing-up of the administration. Gordon leaned over to Marsha and whispered, “Christ, I didn’t make up a speech.”

She said merrily, “Tell them about the future, Gordelah.”

He growled, “That future’s only a dream now.”

She replied laconically, “It’s a poor sort of memory that works only backward.”

Gordon grinned back at her. She had fetched that up from her reading to the kids, a line from the lookingglass, time-reversed scene, the White Queen. Gordon shook his head and sat back.

The Secretary had finished his prepared speech and now introduced the President to a solid round of applause. Scranton read the citation for Ramsey and Hussinger. The two men came forward, awkwardly managing to get in each other’s way. The President handed over the two plaques amid applause. Ramsey glanced at his and then exchanged it with Hussinger’s, to laughter from the audience. Polite hand clapping as they sat down. The Secretary came forward, shuffling papers, and handed some to the President. The next award was for some achievement in genetics which Gordon had never heard about. The recipient was a chunky Germanic woman who spread some pages before her on the dais and turned to the audience, plainly prepared for an extended history of her work. Scranton gave the Secretary a sidelong look and then moved back and sat down. He had been through such things before.

Gordon tried to concentrate on what she said, but lost interest when she launched into a salute to other workers in the field who regrettably could not be honored here today in such august surroundings.

He toyed with the question of what to say. He would never see the President again, never again even have the ear of so influential a person as the Secretary. Perhaps if he tried to convey something of what this all meant… His eyes strayed over the audience.

He had a sudden sense that time was here, not a relation between events, but a thing. What a specifically human comfort it was to see time as immutable, a weight you could not escape. Believing that, a man could give up swimming against this riverrun of seconds and simply drift, cease battering himself on time’s flat face like an insect flapping against a blossom of light. If only—

He looked at Ramsey, reading his plaque, oblivious to the geneticist’s ramble, and remembered the foaming waves at La Jolla, cupping forward out of Asia to break on the bare new land. Gordon shook his head, not knowing why, and reached for Marsha’s hand. A warming press.

He thought of the names ahead, in that deflected future, who had tried to send a signal into the receding murk of history, and write it fresh again. It took courage to send firefly hopes through the dark, phosphorescent dartings across an infinite swallowing velvet. They would need courage; the calamity they spoke of could engulf the world.

Scattered, polite applause. The President gave the hefty woman her plaque—the check would come later, Gordon knew—and she sat. Then Scranton peered into his bifocals and began to read, in the squarish vowels of Pennsylvania, the citation to Gordon Bernstein.

“—for investigations in nuclear magnetic resonance which produced a startling new effect—”

Gordon reflected that Einstein won the Nobel prize for the photoelectric effect, which was considered reasonably safe by 1921, and not for the still controversial theory of relativity. Good company to be in.

“—which, in a series of definitive experiments in 1963 and 1964 he showed could only be explained by the existence of a new kind of particle. This strange particle, the tac—tac—”

The President stumbled over the pronunciation. Agreeing laughter rippled through the audience. Something pricked in Gordon’s memory and he searched the dark bowl of faces. That laugh. Someone he knew?

“—tachyon, is capable of moving faster than the speed of light. This fact implies—”

The tight bun of hair, the lifted, almost jaunty chin. His mother was in the third row. She was wearing a dark coat and had come to see this day, see her son on the bright stage of history.

“—that the particles can themselves travel backward in time. The implications of this are of fundamental importance in many areas of modern science, from cosmology to—”

Gordon half rose, hands clenched. The proud energy in thè way she beamed, head turned to the flow of words—

“—the structure of the subnuclear particles. This is truly an immense—”

But in the tangled rush of the months following November of 1963 she had died in Bellevue, before he ever saw her again.

“—scale, echoing the increasing connection—”

The woman in the third row was probably an aging secretary, called forth to see the President Still, something in her alert gaze—The room wavered, light blurred into pools.

“—between the microscopic and the macroscopic, a theme—”

Moisture on his cheeks. Gordon peered through his fuzzed focus at the lanky outline of the President, seeing him as a darker blotch beneath the burning spotlights. Beyond him, no less real, were the names from Cambridge, each a figure, each knowing the others, but never wholly. The shadowy figures moved now beyond reach, bound for their own destinations just as he and Ramsey and Marsha and Lakin and Penny were. But they were all simply figures. A piercing light shone through them. They seemed frozen. It was the landscape itself which changed, Gordon saw at last, refracted by laws of its own. Time and space were themselves players, vast lands engulfing the figures, a weave of future and past. There was no riverrun of years. The abiding loops of causality ran both forward and back. The timescape rippled with waves, roiled and flexed, a great beast in the dark sea.

The President had finished. Gordon stood. He walked to the dais on wooden feet.

“The Enrico Fermi Prize for—”

He could not read the citation on it. The faces hung before him. Eyes. The glaring light—

He began to speak.

He saw the crowd and thought of the waves moving through them, breaking into white, swallowing foam. The small figures dimly sensed the eddies of the waves as paradox, as riddle, and heard the tick of time without knowing what they sensed, and clung to their linear illusions of past and future, of progression, of their opening births and yawning deaths to come. Words caught in his throat. He went on. And he thought of Markham and his mother and all these uncountable people, never loosening their grip on their hopes, and their strange human sense, their last illusion, that no matter how the days moved through them, there always remained the pulse of things coming, the sense that even now there was yet still time.