Timescape (19 page)

"Yeah, yeah," Gordon said sourly. He couldn't think of a counterargument. Lakin was better at these things, knew more stories, had a subtle instinct for maneuver.

"I propose that we not turn ourselves into Lowells."

"Publish the spontaneous resonance stuff right away," Gordon said, trying to think.

"Yes. We have to finish the NSF proposal this week. We can feature the spontaneous resonance material. I can write it up from the notebooks, in such a way that we can use the same manuscript for a paper to
Physical
Review Letters
."

"What good will it do to send it to
PRL
?" Gordon asked, trying to decide what his reaction was.

"In our NSF proposal we can list the paper in the reference page as

'submitted to
PRL
.' That puts an earmark on it, says it is work of foremost quality. In fact ..." he pursed his lips, judging, peering over imaginary hornrims, "... why not say 'to be published in
PRL
'? I am certain they will accept it, and 'to be published' carries more weight."

"It's not true."

"It soon will be." Lakin sat down behind his desk and leaned forward on it, hands clasped together. "And I tell you frankly that without something interesting, something new, the grant is in trouble."

Gordon looked at him steadily for a long moment. Lakln got up and resumed pacing. "No, of course, it was only a thought. We will say

'submitted to' and that will have to do it." He circumnavigated the office with a measured step, thinking. He stopped before the blackboard with its crude sketches of the data. "A very odd effect, and a credit to its discoverer–you."

"Isaac," Gordon said carefully, "I'm not going to drop this."

"Fine, fine," Lakin said, taking Gordon's arm. "Throw yourself into it.

I'm sure the business with Cooper will resolve itself in time. You should arrange the date of his doctoral candidacy exam, you know."

Gordon nodded absently. To set out on a full research program for the thesis, a student had to pass the two-hour oral candidacy examination.

Cooper would need some coaching; he tended to freeze up if more than two faculty members were within earshot, a remarkably common effect among students.

"I'm glad we have this settled," Lakin murmured. "I'll show you a draft of the
PRL
paper on Monday. Meanwhile— "he glanced at his watch– "the Colloquium is starting."

Gordon tried to concentrate on the Colloquium lecture but somehow the thread of the argument kept eluding him. Only a few rows away Murray Gell-Mann was explaining the "Eight-Fold Way" scheme for understanding the basic particles of all matter. Gordon knew he should be following the discussion closely, for here was a genuinely fundamental question. The particle theorists already said Gell-Mann should get the Nobel for this work. He frowned and shifted forward in his seat, peering at Gell-Mann's equations. Someone in the audience asked a skeptical question and Gell-Mann turned, always smooth and unperturbed, to counter it. The audience followed the exchange with interest. Gordon remembered his senior year at Columbia, when he had first begun attending the Physics Department Colloquia. He had noticed an obvious feature of the weekly meetings, one he never heard talked about. Anyone could ask a question, and when he did all attention of the audience turned to him. If there were several exchanges between lecturer and questioner, all the better. And a questioner who caught the speaker in an error was rewarded with nodding heads and smiles from those around him. All this was clear, and it was doubly clear that no one in the audience prepared for the Colloquia, no one studied for them.

The Colloquium topic was announced a week in advance. Gordon began reading up on the topic and taking down a few notes. He would look up the speaker's papers, with special attention to the Conclusions section, where authors usually speculated a bit, threw out "blue sky" ideas, and occasionally took indirect slams at their competitors. Then he would read the competitors' papers as well. This always generated several good questions. Occasionally such a question, innocently asked, could puncture a speaker's ideas like a stiletto. This would create a murmur of interest in the audience, and inquiring glances toward Gordon. Even an ordinary question, if well delivered, created the impression of deep understanding.

Gordon began by calling out questions from near the back. After a few weeks he moved forward. The senior professors in the department always took the first-row seats, and soon he was sitting only two rows behind them. They began turning in their seats to watch as he asked a question.

Within a few more weeks he was in the second row. Full professors began to nod to him as they took their seats before Colloquium began. By Christmas Gordon was known to most of the department. He had felt a slight tug of guilt about it ever since, but, after all, he hadn't done anything except show a keen and systematic interest. If it benefited him, so much the better. He had been a demon for physics and mathematics then, more interested in watching a lecturer pull an analytic rabbit out of a higher mathematical hat than in a Broadway show. Once he spent a whole week trying to crack Fermat's Last Theorem, skipping lectures to scribble away. Somewhere around 1650, Pierre de Fermat jotted the equation xn + yn = zn in the margin of his copy of Diophantus' Arithmetic.

Fermat wrote that if x, y, z, and n were positive integers, there were no solutions to the equation for n greater than two. "The proof is too long to write in this margin," Fermat scribbled. In the 300 years since, no one had been able to prove it. Was Fermat bluffing? Maybe there wasn't a proof. Anyone who could decide the issue with a mathematical demonstration would be famous. Gordon struggled with the riddle and then, falling behind in classes, gave it up. But he swore that some day he would get back to it. The Last Theorem had a lot of mathematical beauty in it, but that wasn't why he had attacked it. He liked solving problems, simply because they were there. Most scientists did; they were early chess players and puzzle solvers. That, and ambition, were the two traits scientists truly had in common, it seemed to him. Gordon mused for a moment on how different he and Lakin were, despite their common scientific interests–and then suddenly sat upright. Heads nearby turned at this quick movement. Gordon ran the conversation with Lakin through his mind, remembering how his talk about the message had been neatly deflected, first into a dodge about Cooper, then the Lowell story, followed by Lakin's seeming to back down on the "to be published in
PRL
"

business. Lakin got the
PRL
he wanted, with Gordon and Cooper as coauthors, and Gordon had nothing more than the typescript of his message. Gell-Mann was describing, in his precise way, a detailed pyramid of particles arranged by mass, spin, and various quantum numbers. It was all a meaningless jumble to Gordon. He reached into his vest pocket–he always put on a jacket for Colloquium, if not a tie as well–and brought out the message. He stared at it a moment and stood up. The audience for Gell-Mann was huge, the biggest draw of the year.

They all seemed to be watching him as he worked his way through the forest of knees to the aisle. He walked out of the Colloquium a little unsteadily, the message paper twisted in his hand. Eyes followed him as he went out a side door.

"Does it make sense?" Gordon said intensely to the sandy-haired man across the desk from him. "Well, yeah, sort of."

"The chemistry is legitimate?"

Michael Ramsey spread his palms upward. "Sure, as much as I can follow. These industrial names'Springfield AD45, Du Pont Analagan 58'–don't mean anything to me. Maybe they're still under development."

"What it says about the ocean, and this stuff reacting together–"

Ramsey shrugged. "Who knows? We're babes in the woods about a lot of this long-chain molecule stuff. Just because we can make plastic raincoats, don't think we're wizards."

"Look, I came over to Chemistry to get help in understanding that message. Who would know more about it?"

Ramsey sat back in his reclining office chair, squinting unconsciously at Gordon, plainly trying to assess the situation. After a moment he said quietly, "Where'd you get this information?"

Gordon shifted uneasily in his chair. "I'm ... look, keep this quiet."

"Sure. Sure."

"I've been getting some ... strange ... signals in an experiment of mine.

Signals where there shouldn't be any."

Ramsey squinted again. "Uh huh."

"Look, I know this stuff isn't very clear. Just fragments of sentences."

"That's what you'd expect, isn't it?"

"Expect? From what?"

"An intercepted message, picked up by one of our listening stations in Turkey." Ramsey smiled with a touch of glee, his skin around the blue eyes crinkling so that his freckles folded together.

Gordon fingered the tip of his button-down collar, opened his mouth and then closed it. "Oh, come on," Ramsey said, cheerful now that he had penetratett on obvious cover story. "I know about all that tip-top secret stuff. Lots of guys try their hand at it. Government can't get enough qualified people to pick over this stuff, so they bring in a consultant."

"I'm not working for the government. I mean, outside of NSF."

"Sure, I'm not saying you are. There's that working panel Department of Defense has, what do they call it? Jason, yeah. A lot of bright guys in there.

Hal Lewis up at Santa Barbara, Rosenbluth from here, sharp people. Did you do any of that ICBM reentry work for DOD?"

"Can't say as I did," Gordon said with deliberate mildness. Which is precisely the truth, he thought.

"Ha! Good phrase. Can't say, not that you didn't do. What was it Mayor Daley said? 'Coming clean isn't the same as taking a bath.' I won't ask you to give away your sources."

Gordon found himself fingering his collar again and discovered the button was nearly twisted off. In the New York days his mother had had to sew one back on every week or so. Lately his rate had gotten lower, but today–

"I'm surprised the Soviets are talking about this sort of thing, though,"

Ramsey murmured, thinking to himself. The narrowing around his eyes had relaxed and he slipped back into the mold of experimental organic chemist pondering a problem. "They're not very far along in these directions. In fact, at the last Moscow meeting I attended I could've sworn they were way behind us. They've pushed fertilizer for that five-year plan of theirs. Nothing of this complexity."

"Why the American and English brand names?" Gordon said intently, leaning forward in his chair. "Dupont and Springfield. And this–'emitting from repeated agricultural use Amazon basin other sites' and so on."

"Yeah," Ramsey allowed, "Seems funny. Don't suppose it's got anything to do with Cuba, do you? That's the only place the Russians are monkeying around in South America."

"Ummm." Gordon frowned, nodding to himself.

Ramsey studied Gordon's face. "Ah, maybe that makes sense. Some kind of Castro side action in the Amazon? A little under-the-counter aid to the backwoods people, to make the guerrillas more popular? Might make sense."

"That seems a little complicated, doesn't it? I mean, the other parts about the plankton neurojacket and so on."

"Yeah, I don't understand that. Maybe it's not even part of the same transmission." He looked up. "Can't you get a better transcription than this? Those radio eavesdroppers–"

"I'm afraid that's the best I can do. You understand," he added significantly.

Ramsey pursed his lips and nodded. "If DOD is so interested they'd farm out info like this ... Tantalizing, isn't it? Must be something to it."

Gordon shrugged. He didn't dare say anything more. This was a delicate game, letting Ramsey talk himself into a cloak-and-dagger explanation, without actually telling him anything that was an outright lie. He had come over to the Chemistry Department prepared to lay things on the line, but he now realized that would have got him nowhere. Better to play it this way.

"I like it," Ramsey said decisively. He slapped his palm with a whack onto a pile of examinations on his desk. "I like it a lot. Damned funny puzzle, and DOD interested. Bound to be something in it. Think we can get funding?"

This took Gordon aback. "Well, I don't ... I hadn't thought..."

Ramsey nodded again. "Right, I get it. DOD isn't going to pony up for every blue-sky idea that floats by. They want some backup work."

"A down payment."

"Yeah. Some preliminary data. That'll make a better case for pursuing the idea." He paused, as though juggling schedules in his mind. "I have some idea how we could start. Can't do it right away, you understand. Lots of other work under way here." He relaxed, leaned back in his swivel chair, grinned. "Send me a Xerox of it and let me mull it over, huh? I like a puzzle like this. Puts a little zip in things. I appreciate your bringing it by, letting me in."

"And I'm happy you're interested," Gordon murmured. His smile had a wry and distant quality.

JANUARY 14, 1963

He picked his way along Pearl Street, hitting the brakes every moment or two as ruby tail lights winked in warning ahead. Traffic was getting thicker almost daily. Gordon felt for the first time the irritation at others moving in, gobbling up the landscape, crowding this slice of paradise, elbowing him. It seemed pointless, now that he was settled in, to develop this land any further. He smiled wanly as the thought struck him that he had now joined the legion of the genuinely transplanted; California was now here, other people were from there. New York was more a different idea than a different place.

Penny wasn't at the bungalow. He had told her he would be late because of a recruiting cocktail party at Lakin's house, and had half expected she would have a light supper ready. He prowled the apartment, wondering what to do next, feeling light and restless after three glasses of white wine.

He found a can of peanuts and munched them. Penny's papers from the composition class she taught were arranged neatly on the dining table, as though she had left in a hurry without putting them away. He frowned; that was unlike her. The papers were covered with her neat, curling handwriting, labeling paragraphs "tepid" or "arguable," block letters shouting "SEN FRAG" or simply "AG"–failure of agreement between subject and predicate, she had explained to him, not a howl of anguish. At the top of one student essay on Kafka and Christ she had written "King Kong died for our sins?" Gordon wondered what it meant.