Timescape (36 page)

JULY, 1963

Gordon saw that he would have to spend a lot of the summer working with Cooper. The candidacy exam had been a blow. Cooper took weeks to recover his self-confidence. Gordon finally had to sit him down and give him a Dutch uncle talk. They decided on a routine. Cooper would study fundamentals each morning, to prepare for a second try at the exam.

Afternoons and evenings he would take data. By autumn he would have enough to analyze in detail. By that time, with coaching from Gordon, Cooper could take the exam again with some confidence. With luck, winter would find him with most of his thesis data complete.

Cooper listened, nodded, said little. At times he seemed moody. His new data came out smooth, unblemished: no signals.

Gordon felt a letdown whenever he looked over Cooper's lab books and saw the bland, ordinary curves. Could the effect come and go like that?

Why? How? Or was Cooper simply discarding all the resonances which didn't fit his thesis? If you were damned certain you weren't looking for something, there was a very good chance you wouldn't see it.

But Cooper kept everything in his notebooks, as a good experimenter should. The books were messy but they were always complete. Gordon thumbed through them daily, looking for unexplained blank spots or scratched-out entries. Nothing seemed wrong.

Still, he remembered the physicists in the 1930s who had bombarded substances with neutrons. They had carefully rigged their Geiger counters so that, once the neutron barrage stopped, the counters shut off, too–to avoid some sources of experimental error. If they had left the counters on they would have discovered that some substances emitted high-energy particles for a long time afterward–artificially induced radioactivity. By being careful they missed the unexpected, and lost a Nobel prize.

The July issue of
Physics Today
carried a piece in the Search and Discovery section dealing with spontaneous resonance. There was a sample of the data, taken from the
Physical Review Letters
paper. Lakin was quoted extensively. The effect, he said, "promises to show us a new kind of interaction which can occur in Type III-V compounds such as indium antimonide and perhaps in all compounds, if the experiments are sensitive enough to pick up this effect." There was no mention of the apparent correlations between the times when the spontaneous resonances appeared.

Gordon decided to attack the "spontaneous resonance" phenomenon afresh. The message idea made sense to him–at least, something was there, but the rebuffs from his colleagues could not be ignored. Okay, maybe they were right. Maybe a series of bizarre coincidences led him to believe there were coded words in the scope traces. In that case, what was the explanation? Lakin was afraid the concentration on the message idea would obscure the true problem. Okay, say Lakin was right. Say they were all right. What other explanation was possible?

He worked for several weeks on alternatives. The theory governing Cooper's original experiment was not particularly deep; Gordon labored through it, pondering the assumptions, redoing the integrals, checking each step. Some fresh ideas cropped up. He studied each one in turn, running it to ground with equations and order-of-magnitude estimates.

The earlier theory dropped some mathematical terms; he investigated them, looking for ways they could suddenly stop being negligible and upset the theory. Nothing seemed to fit his needs. He reread the original papers, hoping for an offhand clue. Pake, Korringa, Overhauser, Feher, Clark ...

the papers were classics, unassailable. There were no visible escape hatches from the canonical theory.

He was pursuing a calculation at his desk, waiting for Cooper to show up for a conference, when his telephone rang. "Dr. Bernstein?" the voice of the department secretary asked.

"Umm," he said, distracted.

"Professor Tulare would like to see you."

"Oh, okay." Tulare was Chairman. "When, Joyce?"

"Now, if it's convenient."

When Joyce ushered him into the long, spare room, the chairman was reading what Gordon recognized as a personnel folder. Events soon confirmed that it was his.

"Briefly," Tulare said, "I have to tell you that your Merit Increase has been, uh, subject to controversy."

"I thought it was a standard thing. I mean–"

"Ordinarily, it is. The department meets only to consider promotions from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor–that is, getting tenure or from Associate Professor to full Professor."

"Uh huh."

"A Merit Increase, as in your case, from Assistant Professor Step II to Assistant Professor, Step III, does not require the entire department vote.

We usually ask the senior men in the candidate's group–in your case, the spin resonance and solid state group to give an opinion. I am afraid ..."

"Lakin vetoed it, huh?"

Tulare looked up in alarm. "I did not say that."

"But you meant it."

"I will not discuss individual comments." Tulare looked worried for a moment and then sat back, studying the tip of his pencil as though a solution lay there. "However, you realize the ... events ... of the last few months have not inspired a great deal of confidence in your fellow faculty members."

"So I had guessed."

Tulare began a series of reflections on scientific credibility, keeping the discussion safely vague. Gordon listened, hoping there would be something in it he could learn from. Tulare was not the standard administrator sort, in love with his own voice, and this little lecture was more a defense mechanism than an oration. Despite his earlier bravado, Gordon began to feel a sinking sensation steal into his legs. This was serious. A Merit Increase was routine; only really questionable cases had trouble. The big test was the leap from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor, which spelled tenure. Gordon had started out as Assistant Professor I and been advanced to II within a year, which was speedy; most faculty spent two years at each step. Once he reached Assistant III he could be promoted to Associate I, although the typical route was to go to Assistant IV before making the jump to tenure. But now he wasn't going to make the standard step from II to III on schedule. That didn't bode well for his prospects when he came up for tenure review.

A coldness had reached up from his legs into his chest when Tulare said, "Of course, you have to be careful of what you do in any field, Gordon," and discussed the necessary wariness a scientist had to have, the quality of being skeptical about his own findings. Then, incredibly, Tulare launched into a recital of the story of Einstein and the notebook for writing down thoughts, ending in the line, "So Einstein said, 'I doubt it. I have only had two or three good ideas in my life.' " Tulare slapped the desk with genuine mirth, relieved at being able to turn a difficult interview into something lighter. "So you see, Gordon–not every idea is a good one."

Gordon made a weak smile. He had told that story to Boyle and the Carroways and they had sat there and laughed. Undoubtedly they had heard it before. They were simply humoring a junior faculty member who must have appeared to be a buffoon.

He stood up. His legs were strangely weak. He found that he was breathing quickly, but there was no discernible cause. Gordon murmured something to Tulare and turned away. He knew he should be most concerned about the Merit Increase but for the moment all he could think of was the Carroways and their smiles and his own vast stupidity.

JULY 7, 1963

During the summer the rhythm of their days changed. Penny began to sleep later and Gordon found himself waking before her. He resolved that he would stick to his Canadian Air Force exercise program religiously, and the best time to do it was in the early hours, on the deserted stretches of Armdansea Beach. He never liked doing them at home, particularly if Penny was there. He liked going down to the white sands which had been cleaned by the night tides and working his way through the exercises as the sunlight brimmed above Mount Soledad to the east. Then he would run as far as possible along the beach. Each cove was a scooped-out world of its own, the shadows shortening as the sun rose. His sheen of sweat cooled in the blue shadows and the thick ocean air had a tangible watery weight as he sucked it in, puffing, legs setting a thump thump thump that came up through the bones, a curious sound in this air, like chunks of wood falling on an oak floor. He had run like this when he was a kid, on the scruffy beaches of New Jersey. His Uncle Herb took him there often, just after his father started with the sickness. When Jersey crowded in summertime, Uncle Herb took him for rides in a yellow Studebaker, out to Long Island. His mother had always spoken of the people who lived out there, of People Who Actually Owned Beach Front Property, as though they were another race. The first time Uncle Herb took him, Gordon asked if they were going to visit relatives, hoping he had some thread of connection with those mythical folk. Uncle Herb laughed in his quick, barking, not altogether friendly way, and wheezed, "Yeah, I'm going to visit a Mister Gatsby, doncha know," and slapped the side of the big yellow car, making a solid metallic thump. Gordon had sat with his arm out the window for the whole trip, the summer breeze of their passage caressing the black hair on his arm. The hair was more apparent that summer; Gordon compared his to Uncle Herb's and found that he had made remarkable progress in just a year. It took six more years before he understood the enigmatic remark about Gatsby. By the time he had read the book–ignoring the proffered Malamud from his mother–he could no longer remember much about the big houses on Long Island, or whether any of them had a green light on the end of a dock, or any of the other stuff. The beaches there, he remembered, were thin and stony, a bleak margin begrudged by the big inland estates. There wasn't much to do.

Children built sand castles which their parents periodically approved, peering into the yellow-blue sun haze over the tops of their paperback books. He remembered thinking that if Long Island was typical, goyische life was dull. By contrast, Uncle Herb took him to some actual prizefights that summer, fights as big and real as he'd ever thought life could be.

Thump thump his legs pounded on, and before him he saw again the white square of the ring, the two figures dancing and punching, a head jerking back when hit, the ref waltzing around the men, shouts and whistles and a hot, close, salty smell from the liquid crowd. "Didja see that guy Alberts in the fifth round," Uncle Herb said at the intermission, "feet like sandbags? Like a guy looking for a collar button he dropped. Sheesh!"

And after the decision:"Those refs! Giving him two rounds, using what for eyes? I wouldn't want to go on hunting trips with them."

Thump thump thump and the salty smell of the crowd went away and Gordon was running into a rising sun, the tang in his nostrils was a salty breeze thousands of miles from Long Island and he was throwing his fists out as he ran, uppercuts and cross punches and jabs with their own rhythm, his feet connected to his fists, panting hard, a face muddy and formless in front of him, now resolving into Lakin as Gordon wondered at it the same instant that he gave it two of his best, a fake and a belly punch and then the jab, fast and easy, then some more as he thought about Lakin and began to self-consciously erase the swimming face, but held it for three quick jabs, his knuckles sailing through the milky image and the head rocking back one, two, three times –thump thump thump –yeah Uncle Herb taking him places that whole long summer while his father was hanging on, keeping the boy's mind occupied– Gordon threw two more punches at the air, aiming at he didn't know what–mind filled yeah with fights and beaches and books while his father said nothing, smiled when you talked to him, never complained, just crawled away from everyone to die, the way they did it in the Bernstein family, just quietly, no fuss, nobody beating the drum for you, not for a Bernstein –thump thump thump– the beach sand now warming under his feet, sweat trickling into his eyes, stinging, blurring the morning, his throat raw. Jesus, he had run a long way. The cliffs were high here. He had slogged past Scripps pier and down to Black's Beach, a long deserted stretch below the Torrey Pines Park. He was running in shadow now and as he brushed the sweat from his eyes he suddenly saw that he was about to stumble on something. He leaped, thinking it was a sleeping dog, ran on by reflex and looked back. A couple. Legs akimbo. Woman's heels pointed at the sky. The whites of four eyes. Jesus he thought, but somehow it didn't disturb him that much. The idea was logical: lonely beach, horny couple, beautiful sunrise, salty smell.

But it did mean he had to run even farther. Give them time to finish their

–thump thump thump. Certainly it was a better vision to end a run with than Lakin's creamy face, Gordon thought muzzily. Lakin was a problem he couldn't solve and maybe, he saw, that was why he was running so far, wearing himself out so a real fist wouldn't smack into a real face. Maybe, yeah, and maybe not. He had Uncle Herb's contempt for too much analysis. One way to be a potzer was to worry about things like that too much, yeah. Gordon smiled and licked his lips and threw two more punches, slicing the forgiving air.

Saul Shriffer called in mid-July. He had finished up the observations of 99 Hercules, using the Green Bank radio telescope. Results were negative.

No coherent signal rose up out of the interstellar sputter. Gordon suggested using higher frequencies and narrower bandwidths. Saul said he had tried some. Without more to show for their efforts, though, he wasn't going to be able to get any more time on the instrument.

Conventional research projects had precedence. They talked for a few minutes about alternatives, but there weren't any. The Cavendish group had turned down Saul's request for telescope time. Saul said a few reassuring things, and Gordon mechanically agreed. When Saul hung up Gordon felt an unexpected letdown. He saw that, without admitting it to himself, he had been pinning hope on the radio-listening idea. That evening, when he met Penny for dinner at Buzzy's, he did not mention the call. The next day he wrote Saul a letter asking that he not publish any summary of the radio search. Let's wait until something positive comes along, he argued. But more than that, Gordon wanted to keep quiet.