Timescape. Part 9

"You stayed late at the Lakin party?" Penny asked, as Gordon settled into their Boston rocker.

"No, I just stopped off to buy some things. Wine.

The party was just another back-slapping thing." The image of Roger Isaacs or Herb York slapping a venerated philosopher on the back, like Shriners on a binge, didn't really fit, but Gordon let it go.

"Who was it?" Penny said, showing dutiful interest.

"Who were they recruiting?"

"A Marxist critic, somebody said. He mumbled a lot and I couldn't make out much of it. Something about capitalism repressing us and not letting us unleash our true creative energies."

"Universities are great for hiring Reds," Cliff said, blinking owlishly.

"I think he's more of a theoretical communist,"

Gordon temporized, not really wanting to defend the point.

"Do you think you'll hire him?" Penny asked, ob-.viously steering the conversation.

"I don't have any say. That's the Humanities people.

Everybody was being very respectful, except for Feher. This gUY was saying that under capitalism, man exploits man. Feher poked a finger at him and said, yeah, and under communism, it's vice versa.

That got a good laugh. Popkin didn't like it, though."

"Don't need Reds to teach you anything you can't learn in Laos," Cliff said.

"What did he say about Cuba?" Penny persisted.

"The missile crisis? Nothing."

"Hum." Penny said triumphantly. "What's he written, this guy, anyway?"

"There was a little stack of his publications. One-Dimensional Man one of them was, and--"

"Marcuse. That was Marcuse," Penny said flatly.

"Who's he?" Cliff murmured, pouring himself some Brookside into another gla.s.s.

"Not a bad thinker," Penny admitted with a shrug.

"I read that book. He "

"Learn more about Reds in Laos," Cliff said, heft- !

ing the gallon jug so he could pour by resting it on his shoulder. "Filling 'em up here?" he invited, looking at their gla.s.ses."I'll pa.s.s," Gordon said, holding his palm over his gla.s.s mouth, as though Cliff would pour into it anyway.

'ou've been in Laos?""Sure." Cliff drank with relish. "I know this stuff isn't up to that of yours---" gesture with gla.s.s, a ruby red sloshing-- "but it's one d.a.m.n sight better'n stuff over there, I'll tell you.""What were you doing?"He looked at Gordon blankly. "Special Forces."

Gordon nodded silently, a bit uneasily. He had gone through graduate school with a student defer-ment.

"What's it like over there?" he asked lamely."s.h.i.tty.-"What did the military people think about the Cuban missile settlement?" Penny asked seriously."O1' Jack earned his money that week." Cliff took a long pull of the wine."Cliff is back for good," Penny told Gordon.

"Right," Cliff said. "R 'n R forever. Flew me into El Toro. I knew o1' Penny was around here somewhere so I called up her old man and he gave me her address. Caught a bus down." He waved a hand airily, a shift of mood. "I mean, it's okay, man, I'm just an o1' friend. Nothing big. Right, Penny?"She nodded. "Cliff took me to the senior prom."

"Yeah, and did she look great. Ridin' shotgun in a pink evenin' gown in my T-bird." Abruptly he began to sing "When I Waltz Again with You" in a high, wavering voice. "Boy, what c.r.a.p. Teresa Brewer."Gordon said sourly, "I hated that stuff. All that high school hotshot business."Cliff said levelly, "I'll bet you did. You from back east?""Yes.""Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront, all that? Boy, it's a mess back there.""It's not that bad," Gordon murmured. Somehow I 6 9.

Cliff had hit upon a precise similarity. Gordon had kept pigeons on the roof for a time, just like Brando, and had gone up there to talk to them on Sat.u.r.day nights when he didn't have a date, which was pretty often: After a while he had convinced himself that dating on Sat.u.r.day night didn't have to be the center of a teenage life and then sometime after that he had got rid of the pigeons. They were filthy, anyway.

Gordon excused himseft to get some more wine.

When he came back with a gla.s.s for Penny the two of them were remembering old times. Ivy League styles; hot-wiring cars; the Ted Mack Varie Hour; the irritating retort. "That's for me to know and you to find out"; Sealtest ice cream; Ozzie and Harriet; Father Knows Best; ducka.s.s haircuts; the senior cla.s.s re-painting the water tower overnight; girls who popped bubble gum in cla.s.s and left, pregnant, in their junior year; My Little Margie; the dips.h.i.t president of the senior cla.s.s; strapless evening gowns that had to be wired to stay up; penny loafers; circle pins; Eloise, who ruined her crinolines falling in the Pool at the all-night party; getting served in bars where they didn't give a d.a.m.n about your age; girls in straight skirts so tight they had to get on a bus stepping up sideways; the fire in the chem lab; beltless pants; and a parade of other things that Gordon had disliked at the time as he burrowed into his books and planned for Columbia, and saw no reason why he should be nostalgic about now. Penny and Cliff remembered it as dumb and pointless, too, but with a differently soft and fond contempt Gordon could not summon up.

"Sounds like some kind of country club." He kept his voice light but he meant it. Cliff caught the disapproval.

"We were just havin' fun, man. Before, you know, the roof caved in."

"Things look okay to me."

"Yeah, well they're not. Get over there, in mud up to your a.s.s, and you'll find out. The c.h.i.n.ks are ! 7 0 Gregory Ben fordnibblin' away at us. Cuba gets all the newspaper s.p.a.ce, but where it's really happenin' is over there."He finished his wine, poured another."I see," Gordon said stonily."Cliff," Penny said brightly, "tell him about the dead rabbit in Mrs. Hoskins' cla.s.s. Gordon, Cliff took--""Look, man," Cliff said slowly, peering at Gordon as though he were nearsighted and waving a fingererratically in the air, "you just don't--"The telephone rang.Gordon got up gratefully and answered it. Cliff began mumbling something in a low voice to Penny as Gordon left the room but he couldn't make it out.He put the receiver to his ear and heard among the hiss of static his mother's voice say, "Gordon?

That's you?""Uh, yes." He glanced toward the living room and lowered his voice. "Where are you?""At home, 2nd Avenue. Where should I be?"

"Well ... I just wondered ...""If I was back in California again, to see you?" his mother said with irritating perception."No, no," he paused a fraction of a second, about to call her Mom and suddenly not wanting to, with Special Forces Cliff within earshot, "I didn't think that at all, you've got it all wrong.""She's there with you?" Her voice warbled high and faint, as though the connection were getting weak."Sure. Sure she's here. What do you expect?"

''Who knows what to expect these days, my son."Whenever she called him "son" he knew there was a lecture on the way."You shouldn't have left like that. With no word.""I know, I know." Her .voice weakened again. "My cousin Hazel said I was wrong to do that.""We had things to do, places we'd planned to takeyou," he lied.

.was so She couldn't find the word.

TIMESCAPE.

"We could have talked about ... things. You - know."

"We will. I'm not feeling so good right now but I hope I can come out there again soon."

"Not so good? What do you mean, Mom, not so good?"

"A little pleurisy, it's nothing. I threw away money on a doctor and some tests. Everything is fine now." "Oh, good. You take care of yourself, now."

"It's nothing worse than that strep throat you had, remember? I know these things, Gordon. Your sister was over for dinner yesterday and we remembered how--" and she was off in her usual tone of voice, recounting the events of the weeks, tracing an implied return to the fold of the wandering sister, of making cabbage soup and kugel and flanken and tongue with the famous Hungarian raisin sauce, all for one dinner. And after, the "thee-yater," the two of them taking in Osborne's Luther ("Such a fuss about things!"). She had never budged his father downtown to lay out his good hard money for such things,'

but now the process of reclaiming her children justified such small luxuries. He smiled fondly, listening to the easy flow of words from another, earlier life three thousand miles away, and wondering if Philip Roth had heard of Laos yet.

He had a picture in his head' of her at the other end of the long copper cord, her hand at first clenched white around the telephone receiver. As her voice softened he could sense the hand relax, the knuckles not so pale now. He was feeling good as the call ended. He hung the heavy black receiver back into its wall mount and only then recognized the choking gasp of repressed crying coming from the living room.

Penny was sitting on the couch beside Cliff, holding him as he sobbed into his cupped hands. "I didn't... We was goin' across this paddy, followin' a bunch of Pathet Lao from 'Nam back to where we knew they were runnin', toward the Plain of Jars. I ! 7 2 was with this a.s.shole platoon of 'Nam regulars, me and Bernie Bernie from our cla.s.s, Penny--and ...

this AR opened up right on us, an' Bernie's head jerked... He sat down in the mud an' his helmet fell into his hands, he was reachin' up for his face, an' he started to pick somethin' up out of the helmet and he fell over sideways. I was down behind him with the AR fire goin' right over us. I crawled up to him an' the water was all pink aroun' him and that's when I knew. I looked in the helmet and what he was tryin' to get out was part of his scalp, the hair still stuck in it, the round musta run up inside there an' gone in his brain after it smashed his jaw." Cliff was speaking more dearly now, heaving great sighs as the words tumbled out and his palms worked in the sockets of his eyes. Penny hugged him and murmured something. She reached over his broad shoulders and kissed him on the cheek with a sad, vacant gesture. Gordon saw with a sudden, gnawing shock that she had slept with him somewhere back in those rosy high school days. There was an old intimacy between them.Cliff looked up and saw Gordon. He stiflened slightly and then shook his head, his mouth a blur.

He sniffed. "It started to G.o.dd.a.m.n rain," he said clearly, as if resolved to go on and tell the rest of it no matter who was there. "They couldn't get any choppers in to us. Those p.i.s.sa.s.s 'Nam pilots won't come in under fire. We was stuck in this little grove of bamboo, where we pulled back to. Pathet Lao and Cong had boxed us in. Me and Bernie were advisors, not supposed to give orders, they'd put us in with this platoon 'cause we weren't s'posed to make contact at all. Ever'body thought with the rainy season comin' on they'd pull out."He hoisted the Brookside jug and poured himself another gla.s.s. Penny sat beside him, hands folded demurely in her lap, eyes glistening. Gordon realized .he was standing rigid, 'halfway between kitchen and I ? a living room, arms stiff. He made himself sit in the Boston rock/.

Cliff drank half the gla.s.s and rubbed his eyes on his sleeve, sighing. The emotion ebbed from him now and there was a settled fatigue about the way he went on, as though the words drained away the small drops of feeling as they emerged. "This ARVN platoon leader went spastic on me. Didn't know which way was up, wanted to move out that night.

The mist came in across the paddies. He 'wanted I should go out with ten 'Nams, reconnoiter. So I did, these little guys carryin' M-l's and scared s.h.i.tless.

We didn't get a hunnert yards before the point man rammed a punji up his boot. Started screamin'. AR fire comes in, we waddle our way back to the bamboo."

Cliff leaned back in the couch and casually draped his arm around Penny, staring blankly at the Brookside jug.' "The rain feeds fungus that grows in your socks. Your feet get all white. I was tryin' to sleep with that, your feet so cold you think they're gone.

An' I woke up with a leech on my tongue." He sat silently for a moment. Penny's mouth sagged open but she said nothing. Gordon found he was rocking energetically and consciously slowed the rhythm.

"Thought it was a leaf or somethin' at first.

Couldn't get it off. One of the 'Nams got me to lie down--I was runnin' around, screamin'. Th p.i.s.sa.s.s platoon leader thought we was infiltrated. So this 'Nam puts boot cream on my tongue and I wait lyin'

there in the mud an' he just picks this leech out of my mouth, a little furry thing. All the next day I taste that boot cream and it makes me shiver. Relief battalion drove off the Cong around noon." He looked at Gordon. "Wasn't till I got back to base that I thought about Bernie again."Cliff stayed until late, his stories about advising the ARVN becoming almost nostalgic as he drank more ! 7 a of the sweet wine. Penny sat with her legs tucked under her, arm c.o.c.ked against the couch back and supporting her occasionally nodding head, a distant look on her face. Gordon supplied short questions, nods of agreement, murmurs of approval to Cliff's stories, not really listening to them all that closely, watching Penny.As he was leaving Cliff suddenly turned manically gay, wobbling from the wine, face bright and sweating slightly. He lurched toward Gordon, held up a finger with a wise wink, and said, "'Take the prisoner to the deepest dungeon,' he said condescend-ingly."Gordon frowned, puzzled, sure the wine had scrambled the man's brains.Penny volunteered, "It's a Tom Swiftie.""What?" Gordon rasped impatiently. Cliff nodded sagely."A, well, a joke. A pun," she replied, imploring Gordon with her eyes to go along, to let the evening end on a happy note. "You're supposed to top it.""Uh ..." Gordon felt uncomfortable, hot. "I can't ...""My turn." Penny patted Cliff's shoulder, in part as though to steady him. "How about 'I learned a lot about women in Paris,' said Tom indifferently?"Cliff barked with laughter, gave her a good-humored slap on the rear, and shuffled to the door.

"You can keep the wine, Gordie," he said. Penny followed him outside. Gordon leaned on the door frame. In the wan yellow glow of the outdoor lamp he saw her kiss him goodbye. Cliff grinned and was gone.

He put the Brookside jug in the trash and rinsed out the gla.s.ses. Penny rolled up the mouth of the Fritos bag. He said, "I don't want you bringing any more of your old boy friends by here from now on."She whirled toward him, eyes widening. "What?"

TIMESCAPE.

! 7 5.

"You heard what I said.""Why?" --"I don't like it.""Uh huh. And why don't you like it?""You're with me now. I don't want you starting up anything with anybody else.""Christ, I'm not 'starting up' with Cliff. I mean, hejust came by. I haven't seen him in years."

"You didn't have to kiss him so much."

She rolled her eyes. "Oh G.o.d."He felt hot and suddenly uncertain. How much had he drunk? No, not much, it couldn't be that. "I mean it. I don't like that kind of stuff. He's going to get the wrong idea. You talking about your old high school days, arms wrapped around him--"."Jee-sus, 'get the wrong idea.' That's a Harry Highschool phrase. That's where you're stuck, Gordon.""You were leading him on.""f.u.c.k I was. That man is walking wounded, Gordon.

I was comforting him. Listening to him. From the moment he knocked on the door I knew he had something inside, something those rah-rah types in the Army hadn't let him get out. He almost died over there, Gordon. And Bernie, his best friend--""Yeah, well, I still don't like it." His momentum blunted, he grasped for some other way he could prove the point. But what was the point? He had felt threatened by Cliff from the moment he saw him. If his mother had been able to see through that telephone, she'd have known quite well what to call the way Penny behaved. She'd haveHe stopped, avoiding Penny's hostile, rigid face, and looked down at the Brookside jug wait'mg forlornly in the trash for its destruction, incompletely used. He had seen Penny and Cliff with his mother's eyes, his New York imprinting, and he knew that he had missed the whole point. The war talk had put him off balance, unsure of how to react, and now in some odd way he was taking it all out on Penny.

! ? Gregory Ben ford"Look," he began, "I'm sorry, I..." He brought his hands halfway up into the s.p.a.ce between them andthen let them drop. "I want to go for a walk."

Penny shrugged. He shouldered past her.

Outside, in the cool and salty air, fog shrouded the tops of the crusty old live oaks. He marched through this La Jolla of the night, his face a sheen of sudden sweat.Two blocks over, on Fern Glen, a figure emerging from a house distracted him from the jumble of his thoughts. It was Lakin. The man glanced to each side, seemed satisfied, and slipped quickly into his Austin-Healey. In the house Lakin had left, venetian blinds fluttered at a window, momentarily silhouett~ ing a woman's body in the light that seeped from behind her. Gordon recognized the place; it was where two women graduate students from Humanities lived. He smiled to himself as Lakin's Healey purred away. Somehow this small evidence of human frailty cheered him.He walked a long way, past sealed-up summer cottages with yellowed newspapers on their doorsteps, occasionally pa.s.sing by huge homes still ablaze with light. Cliff and Laos and the sense in Cliff's words of things real and important, muddy and grim--the thoughts chewed at him, all churned together in the layered fog with Penny and his distant, inevitable mother. Experimental physics seemed a toy, no better than a crossword puzzle, beside these things. A distant war could roll across an ocean and crash on this sh.o.r.e. He thought muzzily to Scripps Pier, which jutted out below the campus, used as a loading dock for men and tanks and munitions. But then he snorted to himself, sure the drink was now fuzzing his mind. Around him the tight pocket of La Jolla could not be threatened by a bunch of little guys running around in black pajamas, trying to topple the Diem government. It didn't make any G.o.dd.a.m.n sense.He turned back toward home and Penny. It was I 7 ?.easy to get overexcited about threats--Cliff, the -Cong, Lakin:'Waves could not batter down a coastline overnight. And dim ideas about Cubans dumping fertilizer into the Atlantic and killing the life thereyeah, it was all too unlikely, more of his paranoia, yeah, he was sure of that tonight.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

MARCH 22, 1963.

GORDON OPENED THE SAN DIEGO UNION AND SPREAD.it out on the lab workbench. He wished immediately that he had taken the trouble to find a copy of the Los Angeles Times, because the Union in its usual country-b.u.mpkin manner devoted a lot of s.p.a.ce to the wedding between Hope Cooke, the recent Sarah Lawrence graduate, and Crown Prince Palden Thon-up Namgyal of Sikkim. The Union seemed all a-twitter that an American girl would marry a man who would become a maharajah, just any day now.

The real news appeared only as a minor article on the front page: Davey Moore was dead. Gordon thumbed impatiently back to the sports page and was mollified to find a longer story. Sugar Ramos had knocked out Moore in the tenth round of their bout for the featherweight fitle, in Los Angeles. Gordon wished again that he had got ticketS; the press of cla.s.ses and research had made it slip his mind until they were all sold out. So Moore had died of a cerebral hemorrhage without regaining consciousness; I 7 9.

another blot on boxing. Gordon sighed. There were the predictable comments from the predictable people, calling for an end to the whole sport. He wondered for a moment if they might be right.

"Here's the new stuff," Cooper said at his elbow.

Gordon took the data sheets. "More signal?"

'ep," Cooper said flatly. "I've been getting good resonance curves for weeks now, and all of a sudden--whacko."

"You decoded it?"

"Sure. A lot of repet.i.tion in it, for some reason."

Gordon followed Cooper over to Cooper's working area, where the lab notebooks were spread out.

He found himself hoping the results would be nonsense, simply interference. It would be much easier that way. He wouldn't have to worry about any messages, Cooper could proceed on his thesis, Lakin would be happy. His life didn't need any complica-t-ion right now, and he had hoped the whole spontaneous resonance effect Would go away. Their Physical Review Letters note had aroused interest and n.o.body in the field had criticized the work; maybe it was best to leave matters that way.

His hopes faded as he studied Cooper's blocky printing.TRANSWI3PRY 7 fROM CL998 CAMBE19983ZX UA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2.

RA 18 5 36 OEC 30 29.2.

RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2.The mystifying chant of letters and numbers ran on for three pages. Then it abruptly stopped and there followed:SHOULD APPEAR AS POINT SOURCE IN TACHYON SPECTRUM 263 KEV PEAK CAN VERIFY WITH NMR DIRECTIONALITY.

MEASUREMENT FOLLOWS ZPASUZC AKSOWLP BREAKDOWN.

IN RECTANGULAR CO-ORDMZALS SMISSION FROM 19BD.

1998COORGHQE.

! S o Gregory Ben fordAfter this came nothing sensible. Gordon studied Cooper's data. "The rest of this stuff looks like simple on and off. No code to it., Cooper nodded, and scratched his leg beneath his cutaway jeans shorts.

"Just dots and dashes," Gordon muttered to himself.

"Funny." Cooper nodded again. Gordon had noticed lately that Cooper now confined himself to taking the data and venturing no opinions. Perhaps the clash with Lakin had taught him that an agnostic posture was safer. Cooper seemed happy enough when he was getting conventional resonance signals; they were the field stones which would build his thesis."This earlier stufftaRA and DEC." Gordon strokedhis chin. "Something astronomical about that ..."

'Ummmm," Cooper volunteered. "Maybe so.""YesRight Ascension and Declination. These arecoordinates, fixing a point in s.p.a.ce.""Huh. Could be."Gordon glanced at Cooper irritably. There was such a thing as playing cards too close to your vest.

"Look, I want to look into this. Just keep on taking measurements."Cooper nodded and turned away, obviously relieved to be rid of the perplexing data. Gordon left the lab and went up two floors to 317, Bernard Carroway's office. There was no answer to his knock.

He went by the department office, leaned in and called, "Joyce, where is Dr. Carroway?" By convention, office personnel were called by their first names, while faculty always had a t.i.tle. Gordon had always felt slightly uncomfortable about going along with the practice."The big one or the little one?" the dark-haired department secretary said, raising her eyebrows; she scarcely ever let them rest."Big one. In ma.s.s, not height.""Astrophysics seminar. It should be nearly over."

He slipped quietly into the seminar as John Boyle was finishing a lecture; the green blackboards were covered with differential equations from Boyle's new i 8 !g[avitation theory. Boyle finished with a flourish, mixing in a Scotsman's joke, and the seminar broke up into rivulets of conversation. Bernard Carroway heaved himself up and led a discussion between Boyle and a third man Gordon didn't know. He leaned over and asked Bob Gould, "Who's that?"

Gordon nodded at the tall, curly-haired man."Him? Saul Shriffer, from Yale. He and Frank Drake did that Project Ozma thing, listening for radio signals from other civilizations.""Oh." Gordon leaned back and watched Shriffer argue with Boyle over a technical point. He felt a humming energy in himself, the scent of the hunt. He had put aside the whole matter of the messages for several months, in the face of Lakin's indifference and the disappearance of the effect. But now it was back and he was suddenly sure he should press the issue.Boyle and Shriffer were arguing over-the validity of an approximation John had made to simplify an equation. Gordon watched with interest. It wasn't a cool intellectual discourse between men of reason, as the layman so often pictured. It was a warming argument, with muted shouts and gestures. They were arguing over ideas, but beneath the surface personalities clashed. Shriffer was much the noisier of the two. He pressed down hard with the chalk, snapping it in two. He flapped his arms, shrugged, frowned.

He wrote and talked rapidly, frequently refuting what he himself had been saying only moments before.

He made careless mistakes in the calculation, repairing them as he went with swipes of an eraser.

The trivial errors weren't important--he was trying to capture the essence of the problem. The exact solution could come later. His hasty scrawl covered the board.Boyle was totally different. He spoke with an even, almost monotonous voice, in contrast to the quick, jabbing tone Gordon remembered from the Limehouse. This was his scientific persona. Occasion- I a 2 ally his voice was pitched so low Gordon had to strain to hear him. Those nearby would have to stop their side-talk to listen--a neat tactic to insure their attention. He never interrupted Shriffer. He began his sentences with "I think if we try this ..." or "Saul, don't you see. what will happen if ..." A form of oneupmanship. He never made a forceful, positive a.s.sertion; he was the dispa.s.sionate seeker of truth.

But gradually the effort of sticking to this low-key role showed. He couldn't prove rigorously that his approximation was justified, so he was reduced to a holding action. In sum his approach amounted to a repeated invitation to "prove that I'm wrong." Gradually, his voice rose. His face tightened into stubbornness.