Timescape (47 page)

Gordon shrugged, daunted for a moment by her silent condemnation. He saw that she wanted this weekend to work, in some sense. Perhaps he and just plain Jack were supposed to strike up some sudden comradeship.

Well, maybe they would, given the right occasion. But this weekend wasn't it. Gordon knew he had been drifting through it in a daze, distracted by the problem. Yet knowing the fact didn't change it. And whenever he did join in, he found himself misreading Penny's parents. He was acutely conscious of sleeping with their daughter. Sticking it to the shiksa, yeah.

What was the agreed-upon California way to deal with that fact? Politely ignoring the sleeping arrangements? He supposed so, and yet he still felt uncomfortable.

The tree-shaker grunted and yanked, bringing him out of his ruminations. He had been standing with his hands behind his back, his usual lecturer pose, staring at a clod of earth. Gordon looked up at the others, who had moved off toward the car. Penny gave her father a wry, resigned look, gesturing at Gordon: family signals.

There was nothing in the indexes of Jack's books about Hercules.

Gordon paged through them, looking for something about the constellations. There were star charts, seasonal views of Ursa Major and Orion and the Southern Cross. Students who had been reared under city lights needed a simple guide to the stars. Gordon was no different. He studied the lines connecting the stellar dots, trying to understand why anybody thought these looked like hunters or swans or bulls. Then a passage caught his eye.

Our own sun is in motion, just as all stars are. We revolve about the center of our galaxy at a speed of about 150 miles per second. In addition, the sun is moving at about 12 miles per second toward a point near the star Vega, in the Hercules cluster. Many thousands of years from now, the constellations will appear different, because of such motions of stars relative to each other. In Figure 8 the constellation...

Penny drove him over to the Berkeley campus. She had liked the idea of going for a drive around the area again, even though it meant seeing a little less of her parents. Her attitude changed when she saw that he did not want to stroll around the campus at all, and instead headed directly for the Physics Department library. The library was in a building next to the campanile but Gordon refused to ride the elevator up and look at the view. He waved goodbye to her and went inside.

Solar motion, discounting the rotation about galactic center, can be adequately described as a cosine 0 distribution. We are moving away from the solar antapex and toward the solar apex. Since the position of the solar apex represents an average over many local stellar motions, there are significant uncertainties. RA can be specified only to 18 hr, 5 min + I min; DEC to 30 degrees, + 40 min.

Gordon blinked at the clotted sentences, doing arithmetic in his head.

The musty library air carried a heav solemn silence: He found a worn copy of
Astrophysical Quantities
and checked the coordinates again.

Solar Apex RA 18 5 (+1) DEC 30 + 40

He plucked a pencil from his shirt pocket and scribbled beneath it, ignoring the scornful look of a librarian.

RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2

He walked out into a cooling autumn afternoon.

On the Air Cal flight to San Diego he said, '"The coordinates in the message match the solar apex, that's the Point. To within the uncertainties in the present measurements, I mean."

"That's what the plus and minus signs on top of each other mean?"

Penny said doubtfully.

"Right. Right."

"I don't get it."

"That's the direction the sun–and the earth with it–is heading toward."

"Well, oy veh."

"Huh?"

"That's what you say. Indicates surprise. Oy veh."

"No, it means–well, dismay. Anyway, I don't say that."

"Sure you do."

"No I don't."

"Okay, okay. Look, what's this mean, Gordon?"

"I haven't got any idea," he lied.

OCTOBER 14, 1963

"Gordon this is Claudia Zinnes. I wanted to let you know we lost the anomalous effect this weekend. Did you?"

"I wasn't running. Sorry."

"Well, it would have been a waste, anyway. The funny stuff simply faded out."

"It comes and goes like that a lot."

"We will continue trying, however."

"Good, good. So will I."

Gordon spent an afternoon with star charts, plotting the motion of the point in Hercules. It fell beneath the horizon for a good portion of the day.

If there were tachyons–whatever that name meant–they would come directly on a line between his NMR rig and Hercules. When the earth was between him and Hercules, the particles would probably be absorbed.

That meant, to get any signal, he had to run when Hercules was up above the horizon.

"Claudia?"

"Yes, yes, I haven't called you because we have not seen–"

"I know, I know. Look, those coordinates you and I got. They're in the constellation Hercules. I think we might have more luck if we only observed at certain times, so–say, have you got a pencil? I just worked these out. I figure between 6 p.m. and–"

But neither Columbia nor La Jolla could pick up any effect at the times he calculated. Could there be some other interference? It would further complicate things, but what was the cause? Gordon went back and estimated the times when he or Cooper had recorded signals. Most of them matched times when Hercules was in the sky. In some cases, though, there was no record of when the observations were made. A few others seemed to correspond to times when Hercules was definitely below the horizon. Gordon had always liked Occam's Razor: Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. It meant that the simplest theory which explained the data was the best. The interference theory was simple, but it had to take care of the times when Hercules was below the horizon, somehow. Maybe those points were mistakes, and maybe not. Rather than reach any conclusion, Gordon decided to keep trying and let the data sort themselves out.

Gordon had been teaching Classical Electricity and Magnetism, using the standard Jackson text, for only a few weeks. Already his lecture notes were running out and he was behind in grading the problem sets he assigned. The familiar blizzard of demands fell on him: committees; office hours with students; reading over Cooper's work and talking to him about it; arranging seminars. The first-year graduate class looked good, as far as Gordon could tell from the problem sets they handed in. Burnett and More were sharp. The middle of the pack–Sweedler, Coon, Littenberg particularly–had promise. There were the twins from Oklahoma who did uneven work and had an irritating way of cross-examining him. Maybe he was a little touchy these days, but they–

"Hey, got a minute?"

Gordon looked up from his grading. It was Ramsey. "Sure."

"Look, I wanted to talk to you about this press conference Hussinger and I are doing."

"Press conference?"

"Yeah, we're, ah, going to announce our conclusions. It looks pretty big." Ramsey stood quietly by the doorway, without his usual animation.

"Well, good. Good."

"We wanted to use that chain configuration I figured out. You know, the one I thought you and I would publish together."

"You need to use that?"

"It makes the case stronger, yeah."

"How will you explain where it comes from?"'

Ramsey looked pained. "Yeah, that's the catch, isn't it? If I claim it's from your experiments, some people are going to think the whole idea is bullshit."

"I'm afraid so."

"But still, look–" Ramsey spread his hands. "It makes the argument more convincing, to see the structure—"

"No." Gordon shook his head vigorously. "I'm sure you'll be believed, solely on the basis of the experiments. It's not necessary to drag me into it."

Ramsey looked doubtful. "It's a nice piece of work, though."

Gordon smiled. "Leave it out. Leave me out, okay?"

"If you say so, sure. Sure," Ramsey said, and left.

To Gordon the conversation with Ramsey was amusing, a distant reminder of the real world. To Ramsey and Hussinger, publishing first was the crucial step. Holding a press conference put their seal on the work even more strongly. But Ramsey knew nothing would have happened without Gordon, and the thought bothered the man. Proper procedure was to first get Gordon's consent to separate publication, and then to write a warm acknowledgment at the end of their paper. Gordon told Penny about the conversation that evening, and about how strange the whole process seemed to him now. It was getting the result that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure. People became scientists because they liked solving riddles, not because they would win prizes. Penny nodded, and remarked that she understood Lakin a little better. He was a man past the point of finding anything truly fundamental; scientific invention normally trickles away past the age of forty. So now Lakin clung to the accolades, the visible talismans of accomplishment.

Gordon nodded. "Yeah," he said, "Lakin's an operator without real eigenvalues." It was an obscure physicist's joke, and Penny didn't understand it, but Gordon laughed for the first time in days.

"Hey, gee, you're still here?" Cooper said from the laboratory doorway.

Gordon looked up from an oscilloscope face. "Trying to take some new data, yeah."

"Crap, it's late. I mean, I just dropped in after a date to pick up some books and saw the light. You been here since I left for dinner?"

"Uh, yes. I got something out of the vending machines."

"Geez, that's terrible food."

"Right," Gordon said, turning back to the equipment.

Cooper ambled over and noticed the resonance traces scattered on the lab bench. "Looks like my stuff."

"Close, yeah."

"You're doing indium antimonide? Y'know, Lakin asked me about your taking so much time on the rig here. Wants to know what you're doin'."

"Why doesn't he come ask me?"

A shrug. "Look, I don't want to get–"

"I know."

After a few neutral comments, Cooper left. Gordon had been carrying out his normal duties for the last week and then spending the evenings taking data, listening, waiting. There were random yellow jitterings among the traces, but no signal. All eroded into noise. The pumps coughed, the electronics gear gave an occasional hot ping. Tachyons, he thought. Things faster than light. It made no sense. He had taken up the idea with Wong, the particle physicist, and got the conventional reply: they violated special relativity, and anyway, there was no evidence for them. Tachyons, gliding across the universe in less time than Gordon's eye took to absorb a photon of the pale, watery laboratory light–these things went against reason. Then there came a flutter of interrupted resonances.

Gordon had worked out a faster way of compiling the curves and he could extract the Morse coded portions almost immediately.

THREATEN OCEAN

A few moments later, another sputter of interruptions: CAMBRIDGE CAVENDISH LABO

and then a blur of noise. Gordon nodded to himself. He felt comfortable, working here alone, monklike. Penny didn't like his long hours here, but that was a secondary issue. She didn't. understand that sometimes you had to press on, that the world would yield if you just kept at it.

When the scope face cleared he took a break. He walked the silent corridors of the physics building to shake off a sleepy daze. Outside Grundkind's lab was a big sheet of computer paper with a disheartened graduate student's scrawl at the top:

An experiment may be considered a success if no more than 50% of the observed measurements must be discarded to obtain a correspondence with theory.

Gordon smiled. The public thought of science as an absolute, sure thing, money in the bank. They never knew how some slight error could give you wildly wrong results. Below the top scrawl were penciled-in contributions from other students:

Mother nature is a bitch

The probability of a given event occurring is inversely proportional to its desirability.

If you fool around with something long enough it will eventually break.

One fudged curve is worth a thousand weasel words.

No analysis is a complete failure– it can always serve as a bad example.

Experience varies directly with the equipment mined.

He got himself a Hershey bar and went back to the lab.

"Jesus," Penny said in the morning, "you look like something somebody took out of an old trunk."

"Yeah, yeah. Got a class next hour. What's in the larder?"

"Lard, that's what the fuck's in the larder–fucking lard."

"As you're always putting it, come on."

"Cereal, then."

"I'm hungry."

"Two bowls, then."

"Look, I had to work."

"Not getting promoted really shook you up, didn't it?"

"Bull, just bull."

"Bull, right."

"I've got to find out."

"That woman, Zinnes. That's all you needed."

"For confirmation, yes. But we don't understand it."

Gordon rummaged for shredded wheat. He put the toasted rolls into a bowl and threw the packet into the trash. At the bottom of the trash container was an empty half-gallon of Brookside burgundy.

"You staying there tonight?" Penny said.

"Uh, yeah."

"I got a letter from my mother."

"Uh huh."

"They thought you were really pretty weird."

"They're right."

"You might've tried."

"I was trying to do it cool and WASP."

"Cool and dopey."

"I didn't know it was that important."

"It wasn't. I just thought."

"Look, there'll be other times."

"You got a call."

"I mean, maybe around Thanksgiving."

"Uh huh."

"San Francisco, we didn't see much of it."

"It was from New York."

He stopped slurping shredded wheat. "What?"

"The call. I gave him your office number."

"I wasn't in my office much. Who was it?"

"Didn't say."

"You ask?"