Timescape (29 page)

The voice came out of the audience. 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—"

"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 looked 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 association with it. I do not want my name linked with such, such claims. Let Bernstein and Shriffer make what they want–
I
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 was 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 murmuring died. "We have already run over our allotted time, and another lecture is scheduled to begin here. Further, ah, further questions can be asked at the coffee to follow, served upstairs in the foyer." The chairman led a muted ritual applause. It was all but drowned out in a babble of voices as the crowd spilled out of the room. Someone passed near Gordon, saying to his companion, "Well, maybe Cronkite believes it, but..." and the companion laughed. Gordon stood with his back to the blackboard, watching them leave. Nobody came up to ask a question.

Around Lakin a knot of people buzzed. Dyson appeared at Gordon's side. "Sorry they took it that way," he said. "I didn't mean it as ..."

"I know," Gordon murmured. "I know."

"It simply seems so damned unlikely ..."

"Shriffer thinks..." Gordon began, but decided to let the subject alone.

"What did you think of the rest of the message?"

"Well, frankly, I don't believe there is a message. It makes no sense."

Gordon nodded.

"Uh, the press coverage hasn't helped you any, you realize."

Gordon nodded.

"Well, uh, some coffee then?" Dyson bowed goodbye uneasily and moved away with the exiting crowd. 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 hell with them. The hell with the whole damned bunch.

MAY 29, 1963

The maitre d'hotel at the Top of the Cove Restaurant said, "Dinner, sir, s'il vous plait?"

"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, "God, 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 Colloquium 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 lettit 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-class 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-ought-to-do conversation, 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 apartment, studying hard and for the first time really sensing the city, breathing it in. His mother has assigned 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 physics you can eat. Eh" and slap his thigh. But he was not a simple man. Using your intelligence for judging discounts or weighing the marketability of crew neck sweaters–that was smart. His only hobby he had turned into a little business, too. On Saturdays and 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 comers, 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. "He said, '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 nobody 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–"

"Zee compote, surrh," the waiter said smoothly.

"Oh God," 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 Dick."

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 doing. 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 bumper sticker: Au + H 0. Gordon held 2

it between thumb and index finger, suspending it delicately in the air over their table as though it might contaminate the veal piccata. "What's this crap?"

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

"Next you'll be giving me copies of
The conscience of a Conservative
.

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 gave 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."

He said sarcastically, "There 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 waiters."

"They're not 'funny,' Gordon. They're queer."

"What?" he asked blankly.

"You know. Homosexual."

"Fags?" 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 over La 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 sexual sophisticate.