Timescape. Part 21

They emerged from the tree-thick hillside and shot past a jumble of houses, a technicolor spattering.

Traffic thinned as they neared her parents' house.

Clearly, a ritzy section with an appropriately posh name: Piedmont. Gordon thought of Long Island and Gatshy and yellow sedans.Her parents proved unmemorable. Gordon could not be sure whether this was due to them or to him.

His mind kept drifting back to the experiment and the messages, rummaging for some fresh tool to pry up the lid of the mystery. Come at it from a different angle, Penny had said once. He couldn't get the phrase Out of his mind. He found he could carry on conversation and smile and do the dance of guest and host, without ever really taking part in what was going on.

Penny's father was big and rea.s.suringly gruff, a man who knew how to turn money into more money. He had the standard graying temples and a certain sun-baked a.s.surance. Her mother seemed serene, a joiner of clubs and charities, a scrupulous housekeeper.

Gordon felt he had met them before but couldn't place them, like characters in a movie whose t.i.tle won't spring to the lips.The invitation had been to stay over at the house.

Gordon insisted on their staying in a motel on University Avenue--to put them smack in the middle of town, he said, but in fact because he wanted to avoid the touchy-question of whether they would share a room in her parents' castle. He wasn't ready for that issue, not this weekend.Her father had heard about the Saul thing, of course, and wanted to talk about it. Gordon told him just enough to be polite and then deflected talk to the department, UCLJ, and gradually to topics further and further away. Her father--"Jack," he said with a warm, forthright handshake, "just call me plain Jack"--had bought some introductory astronomy books to learn more. This proved to be a handy time-filler, as Gordon sat back and let Jack regale him with a o 2 Gregory Ben fordfacts about the stars, and the obligatory reverent awe at the scope of the universe. Jack had a sharp, inquiring mind. He asked penetrating questions Gordon soon found his own rather elementary knowledge of astronomy was stretched thin. While the women cooked and chattered in the kitchen, Gordon struggled to explain the carbon cycle, supernova explosions, and the riddles of globular cl.u.s.ters. He summoned up smatterings of half-remembered lectures.

Jack caught him in a few b.o.n.e.rs and Gordon began to feel uncomfortable. He thought of Cooper's exam.At last they had a beer before lunch and Jack switched to other subjects. Linus Pauling had just won the n.o.bel Peace Prize: what did Gordon think of that? Wasn't this the first time anybody had won two n.o.bels? No, Gordon pointed out, Madame Curie had won one in physics and another in chemistry.

Gordon was afraid this would launch them into politics.

He was pretty sure Jack was a member of the disarmament-equals-unich school, pushed locally by Willian Knowland of the Oakland Trib. But Jack adroitly side-stepped the point and ushered them into a steaming lunch of soup and well-marbled minute steaks. Jacaranda trees cloaked a portion of the view from the dining room. The rest of the windows gave a sweeping vista of bay and city and hills. The steak was perfect.

"See?" Penny called. "Ajax knows what you're going to do before you know yourself."Gordon watched. The big horse shivered, snorted, blinked. She took Ajax from a standing position directly into a canter. Ajax bounded forward, puffing, ears p.r.i.c.ked. She could get the animal to turn from either foot instantly, and make him walk sideways using only the pressure of her leg. She moved Ajax subtly, coasting around the corral.Gordon slumped against the railings. Come at it a o 3 from a different angle. Okay, Ramsey had the biochem part wrapped' up. But that was a pece, not the whole puzzle. The only other hard data they had was good old RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2, a drum beat that led no-whem.

It had to mean something--"Gordon! I'm taking Ajax out on a trail ride. Want to come?""Uh, okay. No riding, though.""Come on."He shook his head, distracted. All he could remember now from the previous hour of her instruction was how to avoid getting kicked. When you walked behind him you had to keep close to the rump, so the horse knew there wasn't room to get in a good healthy whack with hi hoof. Brushing the tail apparently told the animal you were not a suitable target to relieve its minor irritations on, and it lost interest. This seemed doubtful to Gordon. It was an animal, after all, incapable of such foresight.He hiked along the ridge line above her. RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2. They were just below the lip of the Oakland hills. The rumpled brown landscape of Contra Costa County lay in the distance. The redwoods and pines around him were musty with a dry, swarming odor he could not place. 263 KEV PEAK.

POINT SOURCE IN TACHYON SPECTRUM. A fine dust rose in puffs to greet his steps. It was late afternoon.

Blue shadows lanced through the dusty clouds behind Ajax. Penny had come here every day when she was in high school, Jack told him. Gordon had considered making a wry joke about the Freudian.

implications of adolescent girls and horseback riding.

He decided 'against it after a glance at Penny. CAN VERIFY WITH NMR. This horsy ambience was far away from the sandlot ball he remembered as his only sporL Clop clop of hooves, images of Gary Cooper or maybe Ida Lupino, a stately glide through aisles of looming redwoods: serene. Gordon felt heavy and conspicuous.' He plodded through the woods in black street shoes his mother had bought in 4 0 Gregory Ben fordMacy's, unsuited for this distant continent. He felt surrounded here by a naturalness he found foreign.

RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2, RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2. Yea verily.

That night, when he made love to her back at the motel, Penny seemed changed. Her hips had got harder. Angular patterns of bone spoke to him through the thin cloak of flesh. She was tough, western, a horsewoman. She knew that artichokes grew on a sort of bush, not on trees. She could cook over an open fire. He found her b.r.e.a.s.t.s more pointed, with p.r.o.nounced nipples, rosy and soft, that puck-ered swiftly as he sucked on them. The east was east and the rest was west.

Jack took them out Sunday in late morning to watch some walnutting he had invested in. In the walnut groves near Alamo a mechanical tree-shaker chuffed an- d wheezed. Its hydraulic arm yanked at the tree trunks, bringing showers of nuts bursting from the sky. Men shepherded a contraption down the lanes between the trees, coaxing its engine. It flicked rubber flippers to the side, herding the nuts into ragged rows. A picker followed after. The walnuts were still in their dappled green husks and the picker scooped them up, leaving behind the twigs and dirt and snapped branches. Jack explained that this new method would pay off in no time. A trailer carried the nuts to a gauntlet of brushes and wire nets, where the hulls were rubbed off. A natural gas oven baked off any hulls that stuck. "Going to revolutionize the industry," Jack p.r.o.nounced. Gordon watched the huffing machines and the gangs of men tending them. They worked even on Sunday; it was harvest.

The walnut groves were soothing after the bleak scrub desert of Southern California. The long shad.owed ranks of green reminded him of upper New TIMESCAPE.York State. The danking arm that strangled trees for their nuts was' disturbing, though: a new, robot west."Can I borrow some of those astronomy books of yours this afternoon?" he asked Jack abruptly.Jack nodded, surprised, covering it with a baffled grin. Penny rolled her eyes and grimaced: Won't you ever stop working, even for a weekend? Gordon shrugged, daunted for a moment by her silent condemnation.

He saw that she wanted this weekend to work, in some sense. Perhaps he and just plain Jack were supposed to strike up some sudden comradeship.

Well, maybe they would, given the right occasion.

But this weekend wasn't it. Gordon knew he had been drifting through it in a daze, distracted by the problem. Yet knowing the fact didn't change it.

And whenever he did join in, he found himself misreading Penny's parents. He was acutely consdous of sleeping with their daughter. Sticking it to the shiksa, yeah. What was the agreed-upon California way to deal with that fact? Politely ignoring the sleeping arrangements?

He supposed so, and yet he still felt uncomfortable.The tree-shaker grunted and yanked, bringing him out of his ruminations. He had been standing with his hands behind his back, his usual lecturer pose, staring at a Clod of earth. Gordon looked up at the others, who had moved off toward the car. Penny gave her father a wry, resigned look, gesturing at Gordon: family signals.

'There was nothing in the indexes of Jack's books about Hercules. Gordon paged through them, looking for something about the constellations. There were star charts, seasonal views of Ursa Major and Orion and the Southern Cross. Students who had been reared under dty lights needed a simple guide to the stars. Gordon was no different. He studied the lines connecting the stellar dots, trying to understand 4 o Gregory Ben ford why anybody thought these looked like hunters or swans or bulls. Then a pa.s.sage caught his eye.Our own sun is in motion, just as all stars are. We revolve about the center of our galaxy at a speed of about 150 miles per second. In addition, the sun is moving at about 12 miles per second toward a point near the star Vega, in the Hercules cl.u.s.ter.

Many thousands of years from now, the constellations will appear different, because of such motions of stars relative to each other. In Figure 8 the constellation...Penny drove him over to the Berkeley campus.

She had liked the idea of going for a drive around the area again, even though it meant seeing a little less of her parents. Her att.i.tude 'changed when she saw that he did not want to stroll around the campus at all, and instead headed directly for the Physics Department library. The library was in a building next to the campanile but Gordon refused to ride the elevator up and look at the view. He waved goodbye to her and went inside.Solar motion, discounting the rotation about galactic center, can be adequately described as a cosine 0 distribution. We are moving away from the solar antapex and toward the solar apex. Since the position of the solar apex represents an average over many local stellar motions, there are significant uncertainties. RA can be specified only to 18 hr, 5 min + I min; DEC to 30 degrees, + 40 min.Gordon blinked at .the clotted sentences, doing arithmetic in his head. The musty library air carried a heav solemn silence: He found a worn copy of Astro- physical Quant.i.ties and checked the coordinates again.Solar Apex RA 18 5 (+1).

DEC 30 + 40.

4 o ?

He plucked a pencil from his shirt pocket and scribbled berfath it, ignoring the scornfttl look of a librarian.

RA 18 5 36.

DEC 30 29.2.

He walked out into a cooling autumn afternoon.

On the Air Cal flight to San Diego he said, '"The coordinates in the message match the solar apex, that's the Point. To within the uncertainties in the present measurements, I mean.""That's what the plus and minus signs on top of each other mean?" Penny said doubtfully.,"Right. Right.""I don't get it.""That's the direction the sun--and the earth withitmis heading toward."

"Well, oy veh."

"Huh?"'q'hat's what you say. Indicates surprise. Oy veh.""No, it means--well, dismay. Anyway, I don't say that.""Sure you do.""No I don't.""Okay, okay. Look, what's this mean, Gordon?"

"I haven't got any idea," he lied.'

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE.

*.OCTOBER I 4, I 963.'GORDON THIS IS CLAUDIA ZINNES. I WANTED TO.

let you know we lost the anomalous effect this weekend.

Did you?"

"I wasn't running. Sorry."

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

"It comes and goes like that a lot."

''We will continue trying, however."

"Good, good. So will I."Gordon spent an afternoon with star charts, plotting the motion of the point in Hercules. It fell beneath the horizon for a good portion of the day. If there were tachyons--whatever that name mean--they would come directly, On a line between his NMR rig * and Hercules. When the earth was between him and Hercules, the particles would ,probably be absorbed.

That meant, to get any signal, he had to run when Hercules was up above the horizon.

TIMESCAPE."Claudia?""Yes, yes, I'haven't called you because we havenot seen---""I know, I know. Look, those coordinates you and I got. They're in the constellation Hercules. I think we might have more luck if we only observed at certain times, so--say, have you got a pencil? I just worked these out. I figure between 6 p.m. and--"

But neither Columbia nor La Jolla could pick up any effect at the times he calculated. Could there be some other interference? It would further complicate things, bu what was the cause? Gordon went back and estimated the times when he or Cooper had recorded signals. Most of them matched times when Hercules was in the sky. In some cases, though, there was no record of when the observations were made.

A few others seemed to correspond to times when Hercules was definitely below the horizon. Gordon had always liked Occam's Razor: Ent.i.ties are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. It meant that the simplest theory which explained the data was the best. The interference theory was simple, but it had to take care of the times when Hercules was below the horizon, somehow. Maybe those points were mistakes, and maybe not. Rather than reach any conclusion, Gordon decided to keep trying andlet the data sort themselves out.

Gordon had been teaching Cla.s.sical Electricity and Magnetism, using the standard Jackson text, for only a few weeks. Already his lecture notes were running out and he was behind in grading the problem sets he a.s.signed. The familiar blizzard of demands fell on him: committees; office hours with students; reading over Cooper's work and talking to him about it; arranging seminars. The first-year graduate cla.s.s looked good, as far as Gordon could tell from the 4 ! o problem sets they handed in. Burnett and More were sharp. The middle of the pack--Sweedler, c.o.o.n, Littenberg particularly--had promise. There were the twins from Oklahoma who did uneven work and had an irritating way of cross-examining him. Maybehe was a little touchy these days, but they--"Hey, got a minute?"Gordon looked up from his grading. It was Ramsey. "Sure.""Look, I wanted to talk to you about this pressconference Hussinger and I are doing.""Press conference?""Yeah, we're, ah, going to announce our conclusions.

It looks pretty big." Ramsey stood quietly bythe doorway, without his usual animation."Well, good. Good."''We wanted to use that chain configuration I figured out. You know, the one I thought you and I would publish together.""You need to use that?""It makes the case stronger, yeah.""How will you explain where it comes from?"'

Ramsey looked pained. "Yeah, that's the catch, isn't it? If I claim it's from your experiments, somepeople are going to think the whole idea is bulls.h.i.t."

"I'm afraid so.""But still, look--" Ramsey spread his hands. "It makes the argument more convincing, to see the structure"No." Gordon shook his head vigorously. "I'm sure you'll be believed, solely on the basis of the experiments.

It's not necessary to drag me into it."Ramsey looked doubtful. "It's a nice piece of work, though."Gordon smiled. ';Leave it out. Leave me out, okay?""If you say so, sure. Sure," Ramsey said, and left.

TIMESCAPE.To Gordon the conversation with Ramsey was amusing, a distant eminder of the real world. To Ramsey and Hussinger, publishing first was the crucial step.

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

"Hey, gee, you're still here?" Cooper said from the laboratory doorway.Gordon looked up from an oscilloscope face. "Trying to take some new data, yeah.""c.r.a.p, it's late. I mean, I just dropped in after a date to pick up some books and saw the light. You been here since I left for dinner?""Uh, yes. I got something out of the vending machines.""Geez, that's terrible food.""Right," Gordon said, turning back to the equipment.Cooper ambled over and noticed the resonance a 2 Gregory Ben ford traces scattered on the lab bench. "Looks like my stuff."

"Close, yeah."

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

"Why doesn't he come ask me?"

A shrug. "Look, I don't want to get--"

"I know."

After a few neutral comments, Cooper left. Gordon had been carry'rag out his normal duties for the last week and then spending the evenings taking data, listening, waiting. There were random yellow jitterings among the traces, but no signal. All eroded into noise. The pumps coughed, the electronics gear gThinaVe an occasional hot ping. Tachyons, he thought.

gs faster than light. It made no sense. He had taken up the idea with Wong, the particle physicist, and got the conventional reply: they violated special relativity, and anyway, there was no evidence for them. Tachyons, gliding across the universe in less time than Gordon's eye took to absorb a photon of the pale, watery laboratory light--these things went against reas6n.

Then there came a flutter of interrupted resonances.

Gordon had worked out a faster way of compiling the curves and he could extract the Morse coded portions almost immediately.THREATEN OCEAN.A few moments later, another sputter of interruptions:CAMBRIDGE CAVENDISH LABO.and then a blur of noise. Gordon nodded to himself.

He felt comfortable, working here alone, monklike.

Penny didn't like his long hours here, but that was a secondary issue. She didn't. understand that some- ,: !.

times you had to press on, that the world would yield if you jst kept at it.When the scope face cleared he took a break. He walked the silent corridors of the physics building to shake off a sleepy daze. Outside Grundkind's lab was a big sheet of computer paper with a disheartened graduate student's scrawl at the top: An experiment may be considered a success if ro more than 50% of the observed measurements must be discarded to obtain a correspondence with theory.

Gordon smiled. The public thought of science as an absolute, sure thing, money in the bank. They never knew how some slight error Could give you wildly w-tong results. Below the top scrawl were penciled-in contributions from other students: Mother nature is a biwhThe probability of a given event occurring is inversely proportional to its desirability.

If you fool around with something long enough it will eventually break.One fudged curve is worth a thousandweasel words.No a.n.a.lysis is a complete failure--it can always serve as a bad example.

Experience varies directly with the equipment mined.

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

"Jesus," Penny laid in the morning, "you look like something somebody took out of an old trunk.""Yeah, yeah. Got a cla.s.s next hour. What's in the larder?"

a ! a "Lard, that's what the f.u.c.k's in the larder--f.u.c.king lard.""As you're always putting it, come on."

"Cereal, then."

"I'm hungry."

''Two bowls, then."

"Look, I had to work.""Not getting promoted really shook you up, didn't it?""Bull, just bull.""Bull, right.""I've got to find out.""That woman, Zinnes. That's all you needed.""For confirmation, yes. But we don't understand it."Gordon rummaged for shredded wheat. He put the toasted rolls into a bowl and threw the packet into the trash. At the bottom of the trash containerwas an empty half-gallon of Brookside burgundy.

"You staying there tonight?" Penny said.

"Uh, yeah.""I got a letter from my mother.""Uh huh.""They thought you were really pretty weird."

"They're right.""You might've tried.""I was trying to do it cool and WASE""Cool and dopey.""I didn't know it was that important."

"It wasn't. I just thought."

"Look, there'll be other times."

"You got a call.""I mean, maybe around Thanksgiving.""Uh huh.""San Francisco, we didn't see much of it."*.

"It was from New York."He stopped slurping shredded wheat. "What?"

'ae call. I gave him your office number."

"I wasn't in my office much. Who was it?"

"Didn't say."

TIMESCAPE."You ask?""No." ""Next time, ask.""Yessir.""Oh c.r.a.p."

.The San Diego Union headlined VIET REGIME TOPPLED.

Gordon looked at the pictures of corpses in the streets and thought about Cliff. The Union said it was a straightforward military coup d'etat. Somebody had caught Ngo Dinh Diem and shot him in the head and that was the end of it. The Kennedy administration said they had nothing to do with it.

They deplored the whole thing. On the other hand, they said, maybe this cleared the way for some true progress in the war there. Maybe so, Gordon thought dimly, and threw the paper in the lab trash can.

Claudia Zinnes had picked up some of the same fragments, but not all. The noise level came and went. Gordon wondered if there were some other effect at work, beyond the matter of Hercules being visible. Maybe the beaming of the tachyons was inaccurate.

That would explain why the signal came and went. He held these ideas in his head, together with suspicions and hunches. During the long evenings of watching the scope he turned them like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, fitting edges together. His hunch was based on the solar apex number, and it led to a conclusion about the messages that he found difficult to believe. He tried to steer clear of the conclusion.

There might easily be another explanation, after all.

On the other hand, Wong had mentioned the causality argument against tachyons, so there was at least some crude connection. Occam's Razor did not seem to be of much use here. The whole thing had an Alice-in-Wonderland quality about it. Which meant, he reminded himself, that it was even more impor- a !

tant to stick to the facts, the digits, the hard data.