Timescape (34 page)

He was faintly surprised when they emerged from the damp woods into the moonlight and he remembered he was still in Cambridge.

Gregory Markham was surprised when Ian Peterson appeared in the laboratory, striding purposefully down the lanes of electronic gear. After the usual greeting Greg said, "I would have imagined you didn't have much time these days for secondary efforts like this."

Peterson looked around the bay. "I was in the neighborhood. I saw Renfrew a few days ago and have been busy since. Wanted to talk to you and see this new Wickham woman."

"Oh, about that. I don't see the necessity of my going Stateside right away. There's–"

Peterson's face hardened. "I've cleared your way with NSF and Brookhaven. I've done all I can from my end. I should think you'd no objection to running interference for Renfrew back there."

"Well, I don't, but ..."

"Good. I'll expect you on the flight tomorrow, as planned."

"I've got a lot of interesting theory to go over here, things Cathy brought–"

"Take it with you."

Markham sighed. Peterson was not the easy-going breed of administrator popular in the US, open to suggestion even after a decision had been made.

"Well, it will hold things up, but ..."

"Where's Wickham?"

"Ah, down that way. She came in yesterday and John's still showing her around."

A slim, rather bony woman approached. "Just finished the tour," she said to Markham. "Pretty impressive. I haven't met you, I think," she continued, turning her large brown eyes to Peterson.

"No, but I know of you. Ian Peterson."

"So you're the guy who got me strong-armed out here."

"More or less. You're needed."

"I was needed in Pasadena, too," she said grimly. "You must've lit a fire under some big honcho upstairs."

"I wanted to hear about these tachyons from subuniverses and so on."

"My, you must be used to getting what you want pretty damn fast."

"At times," Peterson murmured lightly.

"Well, I've got the lowdown from Greg and John here, and I think that noise just might have, well cosmological origins. Maybe microuniverses, maybe distant Seyfert galaxies in our own universe. Hard to tell. Quasar cores can't produce this much noise, that's for sure. The data coming into Caltech and Kitt Peak seems to suggest there's a lot of dark matter in our own. Enough to imply there are microuniverses, maybe."

"Enough to close off our geometry?" Greg put in. "I mean, above the critical density?"

"Could be." To Peterson she added, "If the density of dark matter is high enough, our universe will eventually collapse back in on itself. Cyclic cosmos and so on."

"Then there's no way to avoid the noise in Renfrew's experiment?"

Peterson asked.

"Probably not. It's a serious problem for John, who's trying to focus a beam in spite of all the spontaneous emission this tachyon noise causes.

But it'll be no worry for 1963 or whatever. They're just receiving; that's a lot easier."

Peterson murmured a neutral, conversation-breaking reply and said that he had to make some calls. He departed quickly, seeming rather distracted.

"Funny guy," Cathy said.

Markham leaned against the computer console.

"He's the man who opens the cash register. Humor—"

She smiled. "I'm amazed you got funding for all this–" a sweep of the arm. Her eyes moved, studying his face. "Do you really think you can change the past?"

Markham said reflectively, "Well, I think Renfrew started out simply to get funding. You know, a practical icing on a cake that's really fundamental and 'useless.' He never expected it to work. I thought it was good physics, too, and we were both surprised at Peterson's interest. Now I'm coming to think that John was earnest from the first. Look, you've seen the equations. If an experiment doesn't produce a causal loop, it's allowed. That's open and shut."

Cathy sat in a lab chair and rocked back, putting her feet up on the console. The skin seemed stretched thin across her cheekbones, dry and papery, lined by sun and fatigue. Jet-lag shadows made crescents under her eyes. "Yeah, but those heating-up experiments you did first. That's one thing, simple stuff. With people involved, though–"

"You're thinking about paradoxes again," Markham said sympathetically.

"Having people in the experiment introduces free will, and that leads to the problem of who's the observer in this pseudo-quantum-mechanical experiment, and so on."

"And this experiment works. Remember Peterson's bank message."

"Yeah. But sending this ocean stuff–what would success be like? We wake up one day and that bloom is gone?"

"We're thinking in paradox-making channels again. You're separating yourself from the experiment. The old classical observer, sort of. See, things don't have to be causal, they only have to be self-consistent."

She sighed. "I don't know what the new field equations say about that.

Here's a copy of my paper on the coupled solutions, maybe you ..."

"Combining quantum-mechanical supersymmetry and general relativity? With tachyons in?"

"Yeah."

"Hey, that's worth looking at." Markham brightened.

"A lot of the old features are still in these equations, I can tell that much. Every quantum-mechanical event–that is, involving tachyons in a paradox-producing loop. Still leads to a kind of scattering into a family of event-probabilities."

"A wave pattern between past and future. The light switch hung up between 'on' and 'off.'"

"So we still get probabilistic predictions. No certainties."

"I think so. Or at least, the formalism has that part in it. But there's something else ... I haven't had time to figure it out."

"If there were time to think..." Markham puzzled over the neatly typed pages of equations. "Interpreting this is the hard part. The mathematics is so new."

"Yeah, I sure as hell wish that guy Peterson hadn't yanked me away from Calech. Thorne and I were on the verge–" Her head jerked up. "Say, how did Peterson know about me? You tell him?"

"No. I didn't know you were working on this."

"Ummmm." Her eyes narrowed. Then she shrugged. "He's got some power, that much I can tell. Seems like a typical English prig."

Markham looked uncomfortable. "Well, I don't know ..."

"Okay, okay, put that down to my jet lag. The flight was packed, too.

Jesus, I wish Peterson had held off a week or so."

Markham saw Peterson emerge from where Renfrew was working, and signaled to Cathy. She put on a bland, faintly comical face. Markham hoped Peterson wouldn't notice.

"Just talked to my staff," Peterson said, hitching thumbs into his waistcoat as he approached. "I had them look into the people who were working at NMR at Columbia, Moscow, and La Jolla around 1963.

Biographies and so on."

Markham said, "Yes, that's an obvious thing to check, isn't it? Trust Ian to cut through all this physics and try something simple."

"Ummmm." Peterson glanced at Markham, eyebrow lifting microscopically. "Staff haven't much time, with all that's going on. They turned up nothing obvious, like papers in the scientific journals. There was something about 'spontaneous resonance' that never reappeared–seems to have been a red herring–but nothing about tachyons or messages. One chap did stumble on a piece in New Scientist about messages from space, though, and credited an NMR chap named Bernstein. There's a reference to some television appearance, along with a life-in-the-universe type."

"Can your staff dig that out?" Cathy asked.

"Perhaps. A lot was lost with the Central Park nuke, I'm told. The network files were in Manhattan. News programs 35 years old aren't kept in multiple copies, either. I've put a woman to searching, but Sir Mar's got a crash program going on this." He broke off suddenly.

"You think it was this Bernstein who left that note in the bank?"

Markham asked.

"Possibly. But if that is all the effect Renfrew's begins have had, the ocean information hasn't got through."

Markham shook his head. "Wrong tense. We can still keep transmitting; if one message made it, others can."

"Free will again," Cathy said.

"Or free won't," Peterson said mildly. "Look here, I've got to go into Cambridge, see to a few matters. Could you give me a briefing on your work, Cathy, before I go?"

She nodded. Markham said, "Renfrew's having a come round. Don't absolutely have to be back in London until tomorrow."

He and Cathy Wickham went into Renfrew's small office, to use the blackboard. Markham watched them talking through the clear glass paneling of the door. Peterson seemed caught up in the physics of the tachyons, and had largely forgotten the supposed usefulness of them. The two figures moved back and forth before the board, Cathy making diagrams and symbols with quick swoops of the chalk. Peterson studied them, frowning. He seemed to be watching her more than the board.

Markham gestured with the hand that held his drink, spilling a little on the Renfrews' gray carpet. Absent-mindedly he dabbed at it with his foot, as if uncertain whether it was due to him, and went on talking to Cathy Wickham. "Those new equations of yours have some funny solutions.

There's the old probability wave for the causal loops, yes, but ..."

He kept on in a dreamy, thoughtful wax at the same time in the back of his mind hoping Jan would arrive soon. He had called her from the lab when Renfrew told him that this gathering was to be a sort of informal bon voyage party for him. Renfrew was pinning hopes of overcoming the noise problem on the Brookhaven equipment, and Markham's dexterity at talking them out of it.

"Pissing down out, isn't it?" Renfrew remarked, peering out a window.

It was. A brooding gloom had followed the sudden, thundering rain.

Peterson, driving in from Cambridge, had had to roll his window down and lean out to see the gate. Markham walked to the window and caught the heavy scent of damp earth and sodden leaves. Winged sycamore seeds spiraled down into the wet hedgerows. A soaked world.

Marjorie Renfrew hovered at the edge of the

Peterson-Wickham-Markham triangle, unable to join in the casual science chat. John Renfrew prowled the room, pushing little plates of finger food a centimeter nearer the true center of the little tables. His face was flushed and he seemed to have drunk quite a lot already.

The doorbell rang. None of them had heard an approaching car in the hammering rain. Marjorie rushed to answer, looking relieved. Markham heard her voice in the hall, running on with no pause for an answer.

"What a terrible evening! Isn't it absolutely awful? Come in, haven't you got a raincoat? Oh, you must to live here, no matter what, I'm glad Greg reached you. It was at the last minute, yes, but I am quite surrounded by scientists here and need someone to talk to."

He saw rain dripping steadily from the edges of the porch roof behind Jan, before Marjorie closed the door, bucking it with her shoulder to get it into the jamb. "Hi, hon." He kissed her with a casual warmth.

"Let's get you dry." He ignored Marjorie's fluttering and tugged Jan into the living room.

"A real wood fire! How lovely," Jan said.

"I thought it would cheer things up," Marjorie confided, "But actually in a way it's depressing. It makes it seem like autumn and it's still only August, for goodness sake. The weather seems to have gone haywire."

"Do you know everyone?" Greg asked. "Let's see, this is Cathy Wickham."

Cathy, now sitting on the sofa with John Renfrew, nodded to he.

"Oh, to be in California, now that August's here, eh?"

"And this is Ian Peterson. Ian, my wife, Jan."

Peterson shook hands with her.

"Well, how did the experiment go?" Jan asked the company at large.

"Oh heavens, don't start them on that," Marjorie sad quickly. "I was hoping we could talk about something else now you're here."

"Both good and bad," Greg said, ignoring Marjorie.

"We got a lot of noise, but Cathy's detailed explanation of the noise level and spectrum sounds good, so with better electronics John here can sidestep some of the problem."

"I'm surprised Peterson can't get it for you with a telephone lift of his finger," Cathy said sharply. Heads turned towards her. She wagged her jaw back and forth, the sidewise swaying intense and unconscious.

"My omnipotence is overrated," Peterson said mildly.

"It's impressive to see the scientific tail wagging the CIA dog."

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean."

"People ought to put files back the way they found them."

"I'm sure I have no idea what you are— "

"Are you going to hide behind that memorized sentence forever?"

Marjorie stared at the two in horror, caught by the Prinark of tension.

"Won't you have something to drink, Jan?" she broke in desperately, her voice a little too loud. Peterson's brittle retort drowned Jan's quiet reply.

"Here in England we still rather think discretion and civility oil the wheels of social intercourse, Miss Wickham."

"Doctor Wickham, if we're going to be formal, Mister Peterson."

"Doctor Wickham, of course." He made the word an insult. Cathy straightened, her shoulders rigid with fury.

"Your sort can't bear to see a woman as anything but a mindless lay, can you?"

"I assure you that is not the case in relation to yourself," Peterson said silkily. He turned to Renfrew, who looked as though he wished himself a thousand miles away. Markham sipped his drink, looking from one to the other with alert interest. Better than the usual party small talk ...

"Funny, that wasn't the impression I got this afternoon," Cathy continued doggedly. "But then you haven't learned to take rejection very well, have you?"

Peterson's hand clenched on the stem of his glass, knuckles bleached white. He turned slowly. Marjorie said feebly, "Oh my goodness."

"You must have misunderstood something I said, Dr. Wickham," he said at last. "I would hardly raise the subject with a woman of your–ah–persuasion."