Timescape. Part 13

(a suitably non judgmental term), they were beyond his competence; so he was unable to comment on them. This worked; they never replied. On-the-spot cranks were the worst. He learned to be abrupt, even rude. This got rid of most of them. The harder, persistent sort---such as Edwards--Gordon learned to derail, Go gently deflect onto other matters. Then he would edge them toward the door, murmuring rea.s.suring phrases---but never a promise to read a ma.n.u.script, attend a lecture, or vouch for a theory. That way lay further involvement and more wasted time. He would edge them toward the door and they would go grudgingly, sometirrtes, but they would go,A side effect of this crank traffic came to light in casual remarks from other members of the department.

They noted the cranks with interest at first.

Amus.e.m.e.nt followed, and Gordon provided them with anecdotes of strange theories and even stranger behavior. But in time the mood changed. Other faculty disliked having the department known for its garbled image in the San Diego Union. They stopped asking him, at the afternoon coffee break, what new crank had come by. Gordon noticed the change.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN,.

MAY 24, ! 963.

THE SAN DIEGO AREA WAS GROWING AND SPREADing.

Rather than pattern itself on the jumble of LosAngeles, the younger city to the south chose to encourage white-collar employers, "clean" industries, and think tanks. The largest such tank in the area was General Atomic, scarcely a mile from the fledgling University. Quite considerable fish were to be seen swimming in its waters, puzzling at government-sponsored problems. Noted names from Berkeley and Caltech spent pleasant months scrib-blig on blackboards while outside, the General Atomic squirrels and rabbits lazily foraged for their handouts. The animals were part of a psychologist's deliberate plan to evoke rest, quiet, and deep thought; the resemblance to a Disney film may have been accidental. The architect's remorselessly circular motif for the central General Atomic offices, with the eagerly cooperative library at its center, had a similar aim. The ringed roads and buildings recalled Oriental notions of completeness, of serenity, of rest. The 2 3 a curved hallways would increase contact between researchers.

In fact,. though, the inescapable geometry meant that no one could see further than thirty feet along the curving corridors. This tended to prevent the accidental meetings as scientists came and went; they pa.s.sed out of view before they could be noticed.

To go. home or to the library meant moving radially, and thus seeing n.o.body. As Freeman Dyson said that summer, "The mean interaction distance around here is no bigger than a soccer goal." Yet often it was enough; these were exciting tunes. Only six months before, Mariner II had surveyed Venus close up for the first time. Gell-Mann and others were plumbing new depths in particle theory. In April, J. Robert Oppenheimer was named winner of the Atomic Energy Commission's 1963 Fermi award. Oppenheimer had been, in the eyes of many scientists, the public whipping boy of the McCarthy era; he had been declared a security risk in 1954. Now at last the government seemed to be serving some penance for its stupidity.

Hard feelings against Edward Teller, who had not spoken out strongly for Oppenheimer, in turn began to wane.The feeling of opening, of fresh starts, was on the political scene already a clich. The Kennedy ambience was a canon of media hype. Vaughn Meader's 'rhe First Family" alb.u.m, which mocked the Kennedy clan, sold briskly; the public sensed that the derision was all in good fun. Scientists were a more skeptical lot, however, mosfiy liberal or radical, and bgthered by Bobby Kennedy's generally perceived ruthlessness and neglect of the legal niceties of wiretapping.

But the rise of support for scientific research was now coming to seem like a permanent feature, begirming with a sudden rush after Sputnik and rish).g linearly. Everyone knew it would plateau out, but not soon; there was much to be done, and few to do it.Freeman Dyson came to California on leave from Princeton's Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study, to work on the Orion project. Dyson had an immense reputation 3 oas a theoretical physicist and thus was invited to give one of the last spring Colloquia in the UCLJ Physics Department. Gordon was pleased. He was to give the very last Colloquium of the year, and to have Dyson speak beforehand about some speculative ideas might defuse some of the reaction to Gordon.Dyson was slim and humorous, moving gracefully .

before the blackboard as though in a light trance, thinking hard about what he wanted to say and bending each sentence to strike a precise point. He had been very careful earlier to correct George Feher when he was referred to as "Doctor." Dyson had never finished his doctorate and now seemed slightly proud of it, with the Englishman's pride at being, at least in the formal sense, an amateur. But there was nothing amateurish about Dyson's Colloquium. His slides were neat, with clear graphics, some in color.

They had the professional aeros.p.a.ce finish that to Gordon underhned the pleasant perks of prosperity; in his undergraduate days at Columbia, rough sketches and hand-lettered slides were universal.Dyson described his years of work on Project Orion, a plan to propel huge s.p.a.cecraft by exploding nuclear bombs behind them. The blast would strike a "pusher plate," which would transfer the muted kick through shock absorbers to the ship itself. The idea at first seemed like a Rube Goldberg design, but as Dyson spoke it became plausible. The only way to ferry truly large payloads around the solar system was through nuclear drives of some kind. Orion was bhsically simple and used what we were already good at: making efficient bombs. Why not use man's destructive capability for something useful? Dyson thought that a strong effort would not simply put men on the moon by 1970--Kennedy's goal--but beyond, all the way to Mars. The principles involved had been tried in small-scale experiments and they worked. The problem, of course, was the first stage: hfting the craft from the earth's surface on a stuttering trail of nuclear blasts.

2 4 o Gregory Ben ford "Won't you plaster us with radioactive debris?" a voice from the Colloquium audience called.

Dyson pursed his lips. He was a compact man and his sharp features seemed to pin the problem like a b.u.t.terfly. "Much less so than the atmospheric tests we and the Soviet Union are now conducting. We calculate Orion would add no more than one percent to the level of radiation that politics--" he p.r.o.nounced the word carefully-- "already sets for us."

At this point Dyson became wistful, a though he could sense Orion slipping from him. The newspapers brought daily reports of agreements on the Nuclear Test Ban; Washington rumor said it would be signed within months. If so, even Orion's small close of radioactives would be ruled out. Toward the end of the hour, after the equations and graphs, there came a bittersweet quality. History would pa.s.s Orion by. It might someday fly above the atmosphere, once men had a safe way to get it into orbit with chemical rockets. But even then, much of the debris would eventually find its way down into the air. Maybe there was no completely safe way to harness our gift for making bombs. Maybe there were no shortcuts to the planets.

The applause which greeted Dyson's somber conclusion was prolonged. He bowed tentatively toward his audience, smiling with sad eyes.Gordon gave the last Coll'oquium of the year. The audience was even larger than Dyson's of the week before, and noisier. Gordon opened with details of the experiment, history of the field, slides of the normal resonance lines. He had compiled all Cooper's conventional results to date, and showed how these confirmed the usual theory. It was a satisfactory but relatively unexciting discussion. Gordon had considered leaving matters at that--no reference to the messages, no risks. But something made him cut short the parade of slides. He murmured, "However, there 2 a i are some unusual features in the noise observed in our work"--nd he was off, describing the interruptions of Cooper's resonance curves, their suspidon that a pattern lay underneath, then the first decoding.

Gordon used the viewgraph projector, sliding the transparent sheets into view as he spoke, his sentences coming quicker now, the words more clipped, a certain momentum coming into his voice. He showed the breakdown of the first message. He discussed the chances that such a message could be a fluke, an accident. From the crowded room there arose a sustained murmur. He described their efforts to track down a local source for the noise, their failUre, and then the second message. Gordon made no mention of Saul and the 29-by-53 grid; he simply disilayed the data. The RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2 chart lied an entire viewgraph. Only then did Gordonmention "spontaneous resonance," giving Isaac Lakin full credit for the term and the idea. He kept his face blank and his voice flat and calm as he described "spontaneous resonance," gave the statistical probability of such an effect arising from random noise, and left the rows of RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2 on the viewgraph as mute testimony. In dry, precise tones he told of their precautions against outside signals, of the waxing and waning of the "spontaneous resonance"--now he used the term archly, pausing before and after the words as if to put verbal quota tion marks around them, smiling very slightly--and he paced back and forth before the blackboards, trying to remember the measured way Dyson had done it, head tilted down.The voice came out of the audiencel Before the first sentence was finished, heads turned to see the speaker. It was Freeman Dyson. "You realize, I suppose, that Saul Shriffer has made much of this? Of 99 Hercules?""Ah, yes," Gordon said, stunned. He had not seen Dyson in the crowd. "I, I did not authorize him -2 a 2 Gregory Ben ford"And that no one at 99 Hercules could possibly be responding to our commercial radio stations yet? It is too far away.""Well, yes.""So if this is a message from there, they must be using communication faster than light?"The auditorium was silent. "Yes." Gordon hesitated.

Should he back up Saul's idea? Or stand pat?Dyson shook.his head. "I spoke last week about a dream. It is good to dream--but be sure to wake up."A wave of laughter came down from the crowd and broke over Gordon. He stepped backward two paces without thinking. Dyson himself looked surprised at the reaction, and then smiled down from his position halfway up the bowl-shaped auditorium, his face softening as he loolded at Gordon, as though to blunt the edge of his remark. Around Dyson others were slapping their knees and rocking back and forth in their seats, as though something had unleashed a tension in them and now, with a sign from Dyson, they were sure of how to react."I don't propose ..." Gordon began, but was drowned out by the continuing laughter. "I don't..."

He noticed Isaac Lakin standing, a few seats from the front and to the left. Eyes in the audience turned from Gordon to Lakin. The laughter died."I would like to make a statement," Lakin said, voice booming. "I invented the idea of spontaneous resonance to explain unusual data. I did so completely honestly. I think there is something happening in these experiments. But this message thing--"

he waved a hand in dismissal. "No. No. It is nonsense.

I now disclaim any a.s.sociation with it. I do not want my name linked with such, such claims. Let Bernstein and Shriffer make what they want--/ do not cooperate."Lakin sat down decisively. There was applause.

"I don't propose to decide what this means," Gordon began. His voice was' thin and it was hard getting the words out. He peered at Dyson. Someone 2 a 3was whispering to Dyson and smiling broadly. Lakin, Gordon noticed, was sitting with arms folded across his chest, glaring down at the RA and DEC. Gordon spun and looked at the coordinates looming above him, large and flat and remorseless."But I think it's there." He turned back to the crowd. "I know it sounds funny, but ..." The buzzing in the audience kept on. He coughed, and could not seem to summon up the booming confidence that Lakin had used. The crowd noise got louder."Ah, Gordon "He was surprised to find the Department Chairman at his elbow. Professor Glyer held up a palm toward the audience and the nur-muting died. "We have already run over our allottedtime, and another lecture is scheduled to begin here.Further, ah, further questions can be asked at the cof-fee to follow, served upstairs in the foyer." The chair-man led a muted ritual applause. It was all butdrowned out in a babble of voices as the crowdspilled out of the room. Someone pa.s.sed near Gor-don, saying to his companion, "Well, maybe Cronkitebelieves it, but..." and the companion laughed. Gor-don stood with his back to the blackboard, watchingthem leave. n.o.body came up to ask a question.Around Lakin a knot of people buzzed. Dyson ap-peared at Gordon's side. "Sorry they took it thatway," he said. "I didn't mean it as ...""I know," Gordon murmured. "I know.""It simply seems so d.a.m.ned unlikely ...""Shriffer thinks..." Gordon began, but decided tolet the subject alone. "What did you think of the restof the message?""Well, franklyr I don't believe there is a message. Itmakes no sense."Gordon nodded."Uh, the press coverage hasn't helped you any,you realize."Gordon nodded."Well, uh, some coffee then?" Dyson bowedgoodbye uneasily and moved away with the exiting 2 a a Gregory Ben fordcrowd. The Colloquium had trickled away to the coffee and cookies upstairs and Gordon felt the tension drain out of him, to be replaced by the familiar day-end numbness. As he collected his viewgraphs his hands shook. I should get more exercise, he'thought. I'm out of shape. Abruptly he decided to skip the coffee hour. The h.e.l.l with them. The h.e.l.l with the whole d.a.m.ned bunch.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

MAY 29, 1963.

THE MAITRE D'HOTEL AT THE TOP OF THE COVE RES-.taurant said, "Dinner, sir, s'il vous platt?""Uh, yes."He led them to a spot with a commanding view of the La Jolla Cove below. Waves broke into foamy white sprays beneath the floodlights. "Ees zees taab-le hokay?" Gordon nodded while Penny rolled up her eyes. After the man had bestowed the huge menus and gone away she said, "G.o.d, I wish they'd cut out the accent business.""Vat ees eet, madame? You no like zee phony talk?" Gordon said."My French isn't great, but-" she stopped as the waiter approached. Gordon did the wine ritual, selecting something he recognized from the fat book.

When he looked around he saw the Carroways sitting some distance away, laughing and having a good time. He pointed them out to Penny; she duly entered the fresh datum in their running tally. But they did not go over to report the latest figures. The 2 , 6 Gregory Ben fordColloquium lay five days in the past, but Gordon felt uneasy in the department now. Tonight's splurge at the Top of the Cove was Penny's suggestion, to lift him out of his moody withdrawal.Something thumped at his elbow. "I open it now,"

the waiter said, working at the bottle. "Muss lett.i.t breed.""What?" Gordon said, surprised.

"Open ta da air, y'know--breed."

"Oh.""Yes suh." The waiter gave him a slightly condescending smile.After he had left Gordon said, "At least he has the smile down pat. Are all the high-cla.s.s restaurants around here like this?"Penny shrugged. "We don't have the old world culture of New York. We didn't get mugged walking over here, either."Gordon would normally have sidestepped the now-what-you-New-Yorkers-ought4o-do conversa-t-ion, but this time he murmured "Don't krechtz about what you don't know," and without thinking about it he was talking about the days after he moved away from his parents and was living in a cramped apart-merit, studying hard and for the first time really sensing the city, breathing it in. His mother has a.s.signed Uncle Herb to look in on him now and then, since after all he was living in the same neighborhood. Uncle Herb was a lean and intense man who was always landing big deals in the clothing business. He had a practical man's disdain for physics. "How much they pay you?" he would say abruptly, in the middle of discussing something else. "Enough, if I scrimp." His uncle's face would twist up in the act of weighing this and he would inevitably say, "Plus all the phys-?.

?".ics you can eat. Eh. and slap his thigh. But he wasnot a simple man. Using your intelligence for judgingdiscounts or weighing the marketability of crew necksweaters--that was smart. His only hobby he hadturned into a little business, too. On Sat.u.r.days and 2 a ?Sundays he would take the IRT down to Washington Park Square early, to get a seat at one of the concrete chess tables near MacDougal and West Fourth streets.

He was a weekend chess hustler. He played for a quarter a game against all corners sometimes making as much as two dollars in an hour. At dusk he would switch tables to get one near the street light. In winter he would play in one of the Village coffeehouses, sipping lukewarm tea with an audible slurp, making it last so his expenses didn't run too high. His only hustle was to make his opponents think they were better than he was. Since any chess player old enough to have quarters to spare inevitably also had an advanced case of chess player's ego, this wasn't hard. Uncle Herb called them "potzers"--weak players with inflated self-images. His game was no marvel, either. It was strategically unsound, flashy but built out of pseudo traps tailored to snare potzers who thought they saw an unsuspected opening suitable for a quick kill. The traps gave him fast wins, to maximize the take per hour. Uncle Herb's view of the world was simple: the potzers and the mensch. He, of course, was a mensch.

"You know what was the last thing he said to me when I left?" Gordon said abruptly. "I-Ie aid, 'Don't be a potzer out there.' And he gave me ten dollars."

"Nice uncle," Penny said diplomatically.

"And you know last Friday, the Colloquium? I started to feel like a potzer."

"Why?" Penny asked with genuine surprise.

"I've been standing firm on the strength of my data. But when you look at it--Christ, Dyson would've given me a break, would've backed me up, if there'd been any sense to it. I trust his judgment.

I'm starting to think I've made some dumb mistake along the way, screwed up the experiment so bad n.o.body can find what's wrong."

"You should trust your own--"

"That's what marks the potzer, see? Inability to learn from experience. I've been bulling ahead--"

2 a 8 Gregory Ben ford"Zee compote, surrh," the waiter said smoothly.

"Oh G.o.d," Gordon said with such irritation that the waiter stepped back, his composure gone. Penny laughed out loud, which made the waiter even more uncertain. Even Gordon smiled, and his mood was broken.Penny's forced merriment got them through most of the meal. She produced a book from her handbag and pressed it on him. "It's the new Phil d.i.c.k."He glanced at the lurid cover. The Man in the High Castle. "Haven't got time.""Make the time. It's really good. You've read his other stuff, haven't you?"Gordon shruggedoff the subject. He still wanted to talk about New York, for reasons he could not pin down. He compromised by relating to Penny the contents of his mother's latest letter. That distant figure seemed to be getting used to the idea of him living "in flagrant sin." But there was curious vagueness about her letters that bothered him. When he first came to California the letters had been long, packed with chatter about her daily routine, the neighborhood, the slings and arrows of Manhattan life. Now she told him very little about what she was do'rag. He felt the void left by those details, sensed his New York life slipping away from him. He had been more sure of himself then, the world had looked bigger."Hey, c'mon, Gordon. Stop brooding. Here, I brought you some more things."He saw that she had planned a methodically joyous evening, complete with door prizes. Penny produced a handsome Cross pen and pencil set, a western-style string tie, and then a b.u.mper sticker: Au + H20. Gordon held it between thumb and index finger, suspending it delicately in the air over theirtable as though it might contaminate the veal piccata.

"What's this c.r.a.p?"

"Oh, c'mon. Just a joke."

2 a o"Next you'll be giving me copies of The conscience of a Conservatfve. Christ.""Don't be so afraid of new ideas."

"New? Penny, these are cobwebbed--"

"They're new to you.""Look, Goldwater might make a good neighbor--good fences make good neighbors, isn't that what Frost said? Little lit'rary touch for you, there. But Penny, he's a simpleton."She said stiffly, "Not so simple he gaYe away Cuba.""Huh?" He was honestly mystified."Last October Kennedy signed it away. Just like that." She snapped her fingers energetically. "Agreed not to do anything about Cuba if the Russians took their missiles out.""By 'anything' you mean another Bay of Pigs."

"Maybe." She nodded sternly. "Maybe."

"Kennedy's already helped out quite enough fascists.

The Cuban exiles, Franco, and now Diem in Viet Nam. I think--""You don't think at all, Gordon. Really. You've got all these eastern ideas about the way the world works and they're all wrong. JFK was weak on Cuba and you just watch--the Russians will give them the guns and they'll infiltrate everywhere, all over South America. They're a real threat, Gordon. What's to stop them from sending troops into Africa, even?Into the Congo?""Nonsense.""Is it nonsense that Kennedy's chipping away at our freedoms here, too? Forcing the steel companies to back down, when all they did was raise prices?

Whatever happened to free enterprise?"Gordon raised a palm in the air. "Look, can we have a truce?""I'm just trying to shake you loose from those ideas of yours. You people from the east don't understand how this country really works."

2 5 o He said sarcastically, 'Paere might be a few guys on The New York Times who mull it over.""Left-wing Democrats," she began, "who don't--""Hey, hey." He raised his palm toward her again.

"I thought we had a truce.""Well ... All right. Sorry."Gordon studied his plate for a moment, distracted, and then said with dawning perception, "What's this?""An artichoke salad."

"Did I order this?"

"I heard you.""After the veal? What was I thinking of?""I'm sure I don't know.""I don't need this. I'll flag one of those funny wait-ers."'lhere not 'funny,' Gordon. They're queer."

''What?" he asked blankly. ' '

"You know. h.o.m.os.e.xual.""f.a.gs?" Gordon felt as though he had been deceived all evening. He dropped his signaling hand, suddenly shy. "You should've told me.""Why? It doesn't matter. I mean, they're all overLa Jolla--haven't you noticed?""Uh, no.""Most of the waiters in any restaurant are. It's a convenient job. You can travel around and live in the best spots. They don't have family obligations, most of the time their family wants nothing to do with them, so ..." She shrugged. Gordon saw in this gesture an unaffected sophistication, an ease with the world, which he suddenly envied very much. The way their conversation had shifted from topic to topic this evening bothered him, had kept him off balance. He realized that he still could not get a rip on the real Penny, the woman behind so many different faces. The comic Goldwaterite lived right alongside the literature and arts major, who in turn blended into the casual s.e.xual sophisticate. He remembered opening the bathroom door at a faculty ' sl party last year to find her seated on the toilet, her blue gown crescenting the bowl like a wreath of flowers. They had both been startled; she held a square of yellow tissue in an upraised hand. Her heels dug into the grouting between the triangular brown tiles of the floor, so her toes canted c.o.c.kily into the air. The low seat made her seem bottom-heavy.

Between pale thighs he saw the unending oval yawn. A dark sheath of hose swallowed most of her legs, yielding only to the descending tongues of her garter belt. His jaw had sagged open with indecision and then he stepped in, mouth closing on the possibility of faux pas. The mirror on the far wall showed a startled stranger, puzzled. He shut the door behind him, drawn to her. 'ou can see this at home," she said impishly. With a studious deliberation she patted herself, unmindful of him, and let the yellow paper flutter into the mouth of water below. She half-turned on the seat, pressed the chipped ceramic handle. An answering gurgle took away her business from his prying eyes before she arose. Standing, smoothing her dress, she was taller and somehow challenging, an exotic problem. In the bleached, tile pocket she appeared luminous with purpose, a Penny he had not known. "I couldn't wait," he said with a warmth that sounded strange to himself, considering that it wasn't true. He edged by her, unzipped. The mildly pleasurable gush: release.

"Getting domestic, aren't we?" Penny raised one edge of her lipsticked mouth in the lyric curve of a half-smile, seeing the mood in him. "I guess so," he said lazily. Outside, his colleagues were discussing superconductivity while their wives made shrewd observations on local real estate; the women seemed to have a better grip n what was real. Penny's smile broadened and he concluded with a quick spurt that narrowly missed the seat. He gave himself a wobbly drying shake, tucked himself in and dried the seat with more of the yellow tissues. He had never felt this simple and open with a woman before, in such 2 5 Gregory Ben forda rich, enameled air. Not wanting to hang on to the moment for fear that it would burst, he kissed her lightly and popped open the door. Outside, Isaac Lakin leaned against the wall, studying the Breughel prints in the shadowed hallway and awaiting entrance to the bathroom. "Ah," he said as they emerged together. "Up to something." A simple deduction.

Lakin's eyes moved from one to the other as though he could glimpse the secret, as though he had just seen a new facet of Gordon. Well, maybe he had.

Maybe they both had."Gor-don," Penny urged him back into the present.

"You've been going off like that all evening." She looked concerned. He felt a sudden spurt of irritation.

The dream Penny was soft and womanly; the one before him was a nag. "If you're going to do that, why not just talk about it?"He nodded. Her programmed night out, full of forced gaiety, had begun to wear on him. And the sudden shifts in his emotions bothered him as well.

He normally thought of himself as rock-steady, unmoved by pa.s.sing notions."Got a call from Saul today," he said stonily, fleeing his own thoughts. "He and Frank Drake are going to get time on the big radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia. They want to study 99 Hercules.""If they receive a signal, it will prove your case?"

"Right. It makes no sense, but--right."

"Why no sense?""LoOk, I mean--" Gordon waved a hand in exas- eeration. One of the waiters took this as a signal andgan to advance. Hurriedly Gordon motioned himaway. "Even if you bought the story whole, the tachyons and everything--why think there should be radio signals? Why both? The whole point of using tachyons is that radio's too slow."''Well, at least they're doing something."

"Were you a cheerleader in high school, too?"

"G.o.d, you're a nasty b.a.s.t.a.r.d sometunes."

TIMESCAPE.

"Wrong time of the month."

"Look, Sad is trying to help.""2 don't think that's the way to solve the problem.""What is?" When he waved away the question with a faintly disgusted look on his face, she persisted: "Really, Gordon, what is?""Forget it. That's the best way. Just hope everybody else will forget it, too.".You don t really--"ure I do. You should've been at that Collo-qulum."She let him cool for a moment and then tourintuit,''ou were confident a week ago.""That was a week ago.""At least you could work on it."i"Cooper's candidacy exam is two days away. I'm going to concentrate on helping him oreoare and t,he,n o,n geing him out. That's m,, Job"

cecl aoruptly, as though having a"job 'to d'o*snolnve all issues.avoe you should try something like what Saul's doing.'I"No point."sitt';nHOacCn' y.o.u be so sure?" She folded her arms,,, in me rattan chair and looking squarelyat him. Have yo ever thought about the ri 'd wascientists work? It s like militar trainin "g Y."Bulls.h.i.t."

Y.

g'"What do they teach you? Write down everything you know about a problem. Set it up in some equations.

Most of the time, that's enough in itself, right?

You just push the equations around a little and you've got the answer.""Not that simple," Gordon said, shakin his head..

But to himself he had to grudgingly admi pounds hat there was some truth to what she said. a.s.sign symbols, making the x's and y's and z's the unknowns, then rearrange. Made-to-order thinking. They were all used to it and maybe it hid some elements of the 2 S a Gregory Ben fordproblem, if you weren't careful. Dyson, for all his wisdom, could be dead wrong, simply because of habits of mind."Let's have chocolate mousse," Penny said brightly.He looked up at her. She was going to make this evening end right, one way or the other. He remembered her perched on the toilet and felt a warmth steal over him. She had been both vulnerable and serene sitting there, performing an animal functionamid a gauzy gown. Pert, and oddly elegant.

"Vas you-are dinner ex-see-lant, sir?"Gordon peered at the waiter, trying to estimate if he was queer. "Ah ... yes. Yes." He paused. "Lots better than Chef Boy-Ar-Dee."The expression on the waiter's face was worth the price of the meal.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

MAY 3 ! , 1963.

ALBERT COOPERS CANDIDACY EXAMINATION BEgan well enough. Gates, a high-energy physicist,started off with a standard problem. "Mr. Cooper, consider two electrons in a one-dimensional box. Can you write down for us the wave function for this state?" Gates smiled in a friendly way, trying to defuse the tension that oral examinations always had.

The student nearly always balked somewhere along the line, unable to summon up some simple piece of physics purely because of his own skittering nervousness.Cooper worked his way through an opening piece of the problem, sketching the lowest energy state.

Then he stalled. Gordon could not tell if this was simple funk or a calculated delay'mg tactic. Lately, sudents had hit upon the frowning, silent stall as a method for extrac'mg hints from their committee. Often it worked. After a moment Gates said, "Well then ... should the spatial part of the wave function be symmetric?" Cooper responded evenfually, "Ah ...

2 5 Gregory Ben fordno ... I don't think so. The spins should be ..." and then, halting now and then, he successfully got through the rest.Gordon felt uneasy as Gates led Cooper through a series of routine questions, all designed to find out if the candidate knew the general background of the thesis problem he proposed to attack. The air conditioning hummed with vacant energy; Cooper's chalk scratched and squeaked on the board. Gordon eyed Bernard Carroway, the astrophysicist. No trouble there. Carroway looked bored, impatient to be done with this ritual and get back to his calculations. The fourth and last member of the committee was the only problem: Isaac Lakin. As senior professor in the field of Cooper's thesis, his presence was unavoidable.Gates finished his simple questions and Carroway, blinking sleepily, pa.s.sed to Lakin. Here it comes, Gordon thought.But Lakin was not so direct. He took Cooper through a discussion of Cooper's own experiment--usually safe ground for the student, since that was* what he knew best. Lakin stressed the theoretical un-derpinning for the nuclear resonance effects. Cooper wrote down the scaling equations, working quickly.

When Lakin probed deeper, Cooper slowed, then stopped. He tried the stalling tactic. Lakin saw through this and refused to give Cooper any meaningful hints. Carroway began to take an interest, sitting up straight for the first time during the examination.

Gordon wondered why a student in difficulty always provoked more attention from a committee; was it the hunting instinct? Or a proper professorial concern that the student, presumed to be accomplished until he proved otherwise, had suddenly betrayed a fatal ignorance? Either answer was too simple, Gordon concluded.By now Lakin had Cooper on the run. Lakin made him frame a clear picture of the theoretical model and describe the underlying a.s.sumptions. Then 2 5 ?.Lakin cut Cooper's explanation to ribbons. His state-merits were vague, his reasoning sloppy. He had neglected two important effects. Gordon sat absolutely still, not wanting to interrupt because he still clung to the hope that Cooper would right himself after being blown over in this quick storm, and begin to answer correctly. That hope faded. Gordon remembered Lakin relating a comment he had written on a thesis some years ago: 'Young man, there is much in this work which is original and much which is. correct.

Unfortunately, what is correct is not original, and what is original is not correct."Carroway joined in with a few incisive questions.

Cooper seemed to make headway, then reverted back to his withdrawal mode, stall'mg for time. But in a two-hour examination there is more than enough time to uncover weaknesses. Carroway listened to Cooper's floundering replies, eyes still half-closed, but now obviously alert, a sour expression spreading across his face. Gates peered at Cooper as if to understand how a student who had appeared bright only moments before could now be in such trouble. When Cooper turned to answer a sally from Lakin, Gates shook his head.Gordon decided to step in. It was not a good idea to defend your student very much in the candidacy examination precisely because it was so obvious, and it implied that you, too, conceded the student's defects.

Gordon spoke up, interrupting the flow of Carroway's probes. He pointed out that in the time remaining the committee had to consider the form and details of Cooper's experiment, and they hadn't touched on that yet. This worked. Gates nodded.

Cooper, who had been standing with his back pressed to the blackboard, smiled with evident relief.

The committee room filled with the small sounds of hands riffling through papers, bodies shifting position in uncomfortable chairs: the earlier mood was broken. Cooper could repair some of the damage.Five minutes pa.s.sed smoothly. Cooper explained 2 $ 8 Gregory Ben fordhis experimental setup, elaborated details of the rig.

He pa.s.sed around samples of his early results.Lakin gave these papers scarcely a glance. Instead, he slipped some pages of his own into the set of data and pa.s.sed them to Cooper. "My concern here, Mr.

Cooper, is not only with the easy-to-understand re-suits.

I am sure the committee will find them unsur-prising.

What I wish to know is whether they areor'ct.""Sir?" Cooper said in a thin voice."We all know there are... odd... features in your work.""Uh, I ...""Could you explain these things to us?"Lakin pointed at his pages, face up on the table.

They were traces showing the sudden interruption of smooth resonance curves. Gordon peered at them with a sinking feeling.The rest of the examination seemed to go by very quickly. 'Cooper lost a certain calm distance he had successfully kept through the earlier questioning. He explained the spontaneous resonance effect in halting sentences. He would rush forward through an explanation he knew and, reaching the end of it, back away from its implications. He tried to edge around the question of what caused the effect. Carroway, now visibly interested, drew him back to it. Gordon's interjections did nothing to stem the flow. Gates began to second Carroway's skepticism, so that Cooper spun from Lakin to Carroway to Gates, meeting fresh objections as he turned from right to left. "This issue is at the heart of the thesis," Lakin said, and the others nodded. "It must be settied. Only Mr. Cooper knows the truth of the matter." Everyone in the room knew they were talking about the messages and Gordon and Saul Shriffer, not merely about the correctness of Cooper's electronics. But this examination was a way for the faculty to express their professional judgment of the issue, and on this ground the battle had to be fought.

e oGordon let it go as long as he dared, eating into the two hours. Finally he said, "This is all very well, but are we keeping to the point? You have seen the data--""Of course," Lakin shot back. "But are they right?"

"I submit that this question is not what we are considering. This is a candidacy examination. We pa.s.s on the suitability of a topic--not on the final outcome."Gates nodded. Then, to Gordon's surprise, Car-roway did, too. Lakin was silent. As though the question had been settled, Gates asked Cooper an innocuous question about his setup. The examination wound down. Carroway slumped in his chair, eyes half-closed to his own interior world, the spark gone out of him. Gordon thought wryly of what the taxpayers would think of their half-awake public. servant, and then recalled that Carroway followed what were, for theoreticians, standard working hours. He would arrive at noon, ready to subst.i.tute lunch for breakfast. Seminars and discussions with students took him into evening. By then he was ready to begin calculations--that is, real work. This early afternoon exam was, for him, a waking-up exercise.Gordon's real work began as Cooper left the room.

This was when the thesis professor listened carefully to the comments and criticisms of his colleagues, ostensibly for future use in direct'mg the thesis research of the candidate. A subtle tug of war.Lakin opened by doubt'mg Cooper's understanding of the problem. True, Gordon conceded, Cooper was weak on the overall theory. But experimental students were traditionally more concerned with their detailed lab work--"stroking their apparatus,"

Gordon called it, to provoke some much-needed mirth--than with the fine points of theory. Gates bought this; Carroway frowned.Lakin shrugged, conceding it as a tied point. He paused while Carroway, and then Gates in turn, expressed some misgivings over Cooper's occasionally 2 o sloppy work On basic physics problems--the two electrons in a box, for example. Gordon agreed. He pointed out, though, that the Physics Department could only require students to take the relevant courses and then hope that the knowledge sank in.