Timescape. Part 11

his back, the gray of his temples giving him a remote, solemn air. The muted humming of the laboratory seemed to him a warming sound, a preoccupied buzzing of instruments which, if only in their unpredictable failures and idiosyncrasies, often resembled busy mortal workers. The laboratory was an island of sound in the hushed husk of the Cavendish, commanding all remaining resources. The Cav had ushered in the modem age, using the work of Faraday and Maxwell to create the tamed miracle of electricity.

Now, Markham mused, at its center, a few men remained, trying to reach backward, swimmers against the stream.Renfrew moved among the banks and lanes of instruments, darting from one trouble spot to another.

Markham smiled at the man's energy. In part it arose from the quiet presence of Ian Peterson, who lounged back in a chair and studied the oscilloscope face where the main signal was displayed. Renfrew ! 9 7.

fretted, aware that beneath Peterson's veiled calm the man never lst his a.s.sessing eye.Renfrew came stamping back to the central oscilloscope and glanced at the dancing jumble of noise, "d.a.m.n!" he said vehemently. "b.l.o.o.d.y stuff won't go away."Peterson volunteered, "Well, it's not absolutely necessary for you to send the new signals while I watch. I simply stopped by to check up orl matters.""No, no," Renfrew s.h.i.+fted his shoulders awkwardly under his brown jacket. Markham noted the jacket pockets were crammed with electronics parts, apparently stuck there and forgotten. "I got a good run yesterday. No reason why I shouldn't today. I transmitted that astronomical part steadily for three hours."'tI must say I don't see the necessity for that,"

Peterson said, "considering the difficulty in sending the truly important---""It's to help anyone receiving on the other end,"

Markham said, stepping forward. He made his face resolutely neutral, though in fact he was rather dis-tan fly amused by the way the two other men seemed to immediately hit upon an area of disagreement, as though drawn to it. "John here thinks it might help them to know when our beam will be easiest to detect.

The astronomical coordinates---""I fully understand," Peterson cut him off. "What I don't understand is why you don't devote yourquiet periods to the essential material.""Such as?" Markham asked quickly."Tell them what we're doing, and repeat the ocean material, and--""We've done 'all that to death," Renfrew blurted.

"But if they can't receive it, what b.l.o.o.d.y---""Look, look," Markham said mildly, "there's time enough to do it all, right? Agreed? When the noise goes down, the first priority should be sending that bank message of yours, and then John here can---"

! 9 8 Gregory Ben ford"You didn't send it right away?" Peterson cried with surprise.Renfrew said, "Ah, no, I hadn't finished the other material and--""Well!" Peterson seemed excited by this; he stood up quickly and paced energetically in the small s.p.a.ce before the towering gray cabinets. "I told you about finding the note quite surprising, I must admit.""Yes," Markham admitted. There had been considerable agitation when Peterson appeared this morning, bear'mg the yellow paper. Suddenly the entire thing had seemed real to them all.'"Well," Peterson went on, "I was thinking aboutyour trying to, ah, extend the experiment."

"Extend?" Renfrew asked.

''Yes. Don't send my message.""Good grief," was all Markham could say."But, but don't you see that ..." Renfrew's voice trailed off."I thought it would be an interesting experiment."Markham said, "Sure. Very interesting. But it will set up a paradox.""That was my idea," Peterson said swiftly."But a paradox is what we don't want," Renfrew said. "It'll b.u.g.g.e.r the whole idea.""I explained.that to you," Markham said to Peterson. "The switch being hung up between on and off, remember?"''Yes, I understand that perfectly well but--"

"Then don't suggest rubbis.h.!.+" Renfrew: cried. "If you want to reach the past and know you have done it, then leave hands off."Peterson said with glacial calm, "The only reason you do know is that I went to the bank in La Jolla.

The way I see the matter is that I have confirmedyour success."There was an awkward silence. "Ah ... yes,"

Markham put in to fill the pause. He had to admit Peterson was right. It was precisely the kind of simple check he or Renfrew should have tried. But they '! 9 9.

were schooled in thinking of mechanical experi-men.ts, full of devices which operated without human intervention. The notion of asking for a confirming sign simply had not occurred to them. And now Peterson, the know-nothing administrator, had proved the whole scheme was right, and he had done it without any sophisticated thinking at all.Markham took a deep breath. It was heady, realizing that you were doing something never accomplished before, something beyond your' own understanding, but undeniably real. It had often been said that science at times put you into a kind of contact with the world that nothing else could. This morning, and Peterson's single sheet, had done that, but in a strangely different way. The triumph of an experiment was when you reached a fresh plateau of knowledge. With tachyons, though, they had no true understanding. There was only the simple note on a sc.r.a.p of yellow."Ian, I know how you feel. It would be d.a.m.ned interesting to omit your message. But no one knows what that would mean. It might prevent us from doing what you want--namely convey the ocean information."Renfrew underlined these sentiments with a "d.a.m.ned right!" and turned back to the apparatUs.Peterson's eyelids lowered, as though he was deep in thought. "A good point. You know, for a moment there I thought there could be some way of finding out more that way.""We could," Markham agreed. "But unless we do only what we understand ...""Right," Peterson said. "We rule out paradoxes, agreed. But later ..." He had a wistful look."Later, sure," Markham mtfrmured. It was odd, he thought, how the players had reversed roles here.

Peterson was supposedly the can-do administrator, pressing for results above all else. Yet now Peterson wanted to push the parameters of the experiment and find out some new physics.

2 o o Gregory BenfOrdAnd opposing this were Renfrew and himself, suddenly uncertain of what a paradox might produce.

Ironies abounded.

An hour later the fine points of logic had faded, as they so often did, before the gritty details of the experiment itself. Noise smeared the flat face of the oscilloscope.

Despite earnest work from the technicians the jitter in the experiment would not diminish. Unless it did, the tachyon beam would be uselessly diffuse and weak."Y'know," Markham murmured, leaning back in his wooden lab chair, "I think your Caltech stuff may bear on this, Ian."Peterson looked up from reading the file with a red CONFIDENTIAL stamped across it. During the lulls he had been steadily working his way through a briefcase of paperwork. "Oh? How?""Those cosmological calculations--good work.

Brilliant, in fact. Cl.u.s.tered universes. Now, suppose someone inside them is sending out tachyon signals.

The tachyons can burrow right out of those smaller universes. All the tachyons have to do is pa.s.s through the event horizon of the closed-off microgeo-metry.

Then they're free. They escape from the gravitational singularities and we can pick them up."Peterson frowned. "These ... microuniverses ...

are other ... other places to live? They might be inhabited?"Markham grinned. "Sure." He had the serene confidence of a man who has worked through the mathematics and seen the solutions. There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collaps'rag mathematically into con- e o !

crete cla.s.sical ent.i.tiespotential; ma.s.s; forces vectoring in a-curved geometry--that was a sublime exPErienCe. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics. Markham saw in Peterson's face the hesitant puzzlement that swam over people when they struggled to visualize ideas beyond the corrfforting three dimensions and Euclidean certainties which framed their world. Behind the equations were immensities of s.p.a.ce and dust, dead but furious matter bending to the geomet/'ic will of gravity, stars like match heads exploding in a vast night, orange sparks that lit only a thin ring of child planets. The mathematics was what made it all; the pictures men carried inside their heads were useful but clumsy, cartoons of a world that was as subtle as silk, infinitely smooth and varied. After you had seen that, really seen it, the fact that worlds could exist within worlds, that universes could thrive within our own, was not so huge a riddle. The mathematics buoyed you.Markham said, "I think that may be an explanation for the anomalous noise level. It's not thermally generated at all, if I'm right. Instead, the noise comes from tachyons. The indium antimonide sample isn't just transmitting tachyons, it's receiving them. There's a tachyon background we've neglected.""A background?" Renfrew asked. "From what?"

"Let's see. Try the correlator."Renfrew made a few adjustments and steppedback from the oscilloscope. 'Fhat should do it."

"Do what?" Peterson demanded."This is a lock-in coherence a.n.a.lyzer," Markham explained. "It culls out the genuine noise in the in-dium sample sound wave noise, that is--and brings up any signals out of the random background."Renfrew stared intently at the oscilloscope face. A complex wave form wavered across the scale. "It seems to be a series of pulses strung out at regular intervals," he said. "But the signal decays in time."

2 0 He pointed at a fluid line which faded into the noise level as it neared the right side of the screen."Quite regular, yes," Markham said. "Here's one peak, then a pause, then two peaks together, then nothing again, then four nearly on top of each other, then nothing. Strange."'%Vhat do you think it is?" Peterson asked."Not ordinary background, that's clear," Renfrew answered.Markham said, "It's coherent, can't be natural."

Renfrew: "No. More like ...""A code," Markham finished. "Let's take some of this down." He began writing on a clip-board. "Is this a real-time display?""No, I just rigged it to take a sample of the noise for a hundred-microsecond interval." Renfrew reached for the oscilloscope dials. "Would you like another interval?""Wait till I copy this."Peterson asked, ''Why don't you just photograph it?"Renfrew looked at him significantly. ''We have no film. There's a shortage and priority doesn't go to laboratories these days, you know.""Ian, take this down," Markham interrupted.

Within an hour the results were obvious. The noise was in fact a sum of many signals, each overlaid on the rest. Occasionally a short stuttering group of pulses would appear, only to be swallowed in a storm of rapid jiggling."Why are there so many competing signals?"

Peterson asked.Markham shrugged. He wrinkled his nose in an unconscious effort to .work his gla.s.ses back up. It gave him an unintentional expression of sudden, vast distaste. "I suppose it's possible they're from the far future. But the vest pocket universe sounds good to me, too."

;o: Renfrew Said, "I wouldn't put much weight on a new astrotYlysical theory. Those fellows speculate in ideas like stock brokers."Markham nodded. "Granted, they often take a grain of truth and blow it up into a kind of intellectual puffed rice. But this time they have a point.

There are unexplained sources of infrared emission, far out among the galaxies. The microuniverses would look like that." He made a tent of his fingers and smiled into it, his favorite academic esture. At times like these it was comforting to have a touch of ritual to get you through. "That scope of yours shows a hundred times the ordinary noise you expected, john. I like the notion that we're not unique, and there is a background of tachyon signals. Signals from different times, yes. And from those microscopic universes, too.""It comes and goes, though," Renfrew observed. "I can still transmit a fraction of the time.""Good," Peterson said. He had not spoken for some while. "Keep on with it, then."Renfrew said, "I hope the fellows back in 1963 haven't got the detector sensitivity to study this noise. If they stick to our signals--which should stand out above this background, when we're transmitting properly--they'll be all right.""Greg," Peterson mused, his eyes remote, "there's another point.""Oh? What?""You keep talking about the small universes inside ours and how we're overhear'mg their tachyon messages.""Right.""Isn't that a bit self-centered? How do we know we, in turn, are not a vest pocket universe inside somebody else's?"

Gregory Markham slipped away from the Cav in early afternoon. Peterson and Renfrew were still un- o a Gregory Ben fordable to resist sniping at each other. Peterson was obviously drawn .to the experiment, despite his automatic habit of distancing himself. Renfrew appreciated Peterson's support, but kept pus.h.i.+ng for more.

Markham found the ornate dance between the two men comic, all the more so because it was virtually unconscious. With their cla.s.s-calibrated speech patterns, the two men had squared off at the first differing vowel. If Renfrew had stayed a laborer's son he would have got along smoothly with Peterson, each knowing his time-ordained role. As a man swimming in exotic academic waters, however, Renfrew had no referents. Science had a way of bringing about such conflicts. You could come out of nowhere and make your mark, without having learned any new social mannerisms. Fred Hoyle's stay at Cambridge had been a case in point. Hoyle had been an astronomer in the old mold of eccentric-seeker-after-truth, advancing controversial theories and sweeping aside the cool, rational mannerisms when they didn't suit his mood. Renfrew might well prove as remarkable as Hoyle, a working-cla.s.s salmon swimming upstream all the way, if this experiment went through.

Most rising scientists from obscure backgrounds nowadays kept a neutral, bland exterior; it was safer.

Renfrew didn't. The big modern research teams depended for progress on well-organized, smooth-running, large-scale operations, whose stability demanded a minimum of upsetting--what was the jargon--"interpersonal relations.h.i.+ps." Renfrew was a loner with a sandpaper psyche. The odd point was that Renfrew was quite civil towards most people; only the deliberate flaunting of cla.s.s symbols by such as Peterson set him off. Markham had watched cla.s.s friction worsen in England for decades, catching glimpses on his occasional visits. Time seemed to strengthen the ties of cla.s.s, much to the confusion of the condescending Marxists who tended the lumber-ing government programs. The explanation seemed dear to Markham: in the steepening economic slide, :, o $following on the rich years of North Sea off, people stressed differences, in order to keep alive their sense of self-worth. Us against Them stirred the blood. Better to play that distracting, antique game than to face the gray grip of a closing future.Markham shrugged, mulling this over, and walked along the Coton footpath back toward the solemn spires of town. He was an American and thus exempt from the subtle cla.s.s rituals, a visitor given a temporary pa.s.sport. A year here had acustomed him to the language differences; now phrases like "the committee are" and "the government have"

didn't cause a stumble as the eye slid through the 'sentence. He now recognized Peterson's skeptical arch of the eyebrow and rising, dry, "Hmmmm?" as a well-honed social weapon. The graceful, adroit sound of Peterson's 'qehzure" and "shedule" were certainly far better than the mechanical quack-quack of American administrators, who would call any information an "input," were always "addressing a problem," submitted proposals as a "package" but didn't always "buy it," and who engaged in "dialogue"

with audiences; if you objected to such deliberately clanky talk, they answered that this was "only semantics."Markham thrust his hands into his jacket pockets and tramped on. He had been irked by a balky calculation in mathematical physics for days now, and wanted a long, solitary walk to help sweep his irritation away. He pa.s.sed a construction site, where over-alled chimps carried stonework and did the odd heavy job. Remarkable, what the tinkering with the DNA had done in the last few years.As he approached a bus queue something caught his attention. A black man in tennis shoes was standing at the end of the line, eyes dancing, his head jerking as if on wires. Markham came up close to him and muttered, "Bobby round the corner," and moved on. The man froze. "Huh? Wha?" He looked wildly around. He eyed Markham. A hesitation, then he o Gregory Ben ford decided--he raced off in the opposite direction.

Markham smiled. The standard tactic was to wait until the bus hauled up and the queue's attention was focused on getting aboard. Then you grabbed purses away from a few women and left in high gear. Before the crowd could redirect its attention you were streets away. Markham had seen the same maneuver in Los Angeles. He realized, a bit ruefully, that he might not have recognized the setup if the man hadn't been black.

He strolled down the High Street. Beggars' hands appeared magically when they saw his American jacket, and then disappeared quickly as he scowled.

On the corner of St. Andrews and Market streets was Barrett's barber shop, a faded sign proclaiming, "Barrett is willing to shave all, and only, men unwilling to shave themselves." Markham laughed. This was a Cambridge insiders' joke, a reference to the local logical trickery of Bertrand Russell and the mathematicians of a century ago. It yanked him back towards -the problem that was bothering him, the tangle of reason surrounding Renfrew's experiments.

The obvious question was, "But what about Barrett? Who can shave poor old Barrett?" If Barrett were willing to shave himself, and if the sign were true, then he was not willing to shave himself. And if Barrett wouldn't shave himself, then according to his sign he was willing to shave himself. Russell had devised this paradox, and tried to solve it by inventing what 'he called a "meta-sign" which said, "Barrett shall be excluded from the cla.s.s of all men to whom the first sign refers." That sewed up the problem nicely for Barrett, but in the real world things weren't so easy. Peterson's suggestion this morning, about not sending the message about the bank, had disturbed Markham more than he had wanted to show.

The trouble with the whole tachyon theory was that the causal loop idea didn't fit our own perception of time as moving forward. What if they didn't send the bank message? The neat little loop, with arrows pa.s.s- 2 o ?ing from future to past and back again, was flawed.

It didn't hai/e any human beings in it. The aim of a modern physical theory was to talk about reality as independent of the observer--at least, as long as quantum mechanics was left out. But if Peterson was in the causal loop, he had the ability to change his mind at any time, and change the whole d.a.m.n thing.

Or did he? Markham paused, looking through the filmed gla.s.s at a boy getting his amber hair cut.

Where was human free will in this puzzle?The equations were mute. If Renfrew succeeded, how would the things around them change? Markham had a sudden, sinking vision of a world in which the ocean bloom simply had not happened. He and Renfrew and Peterson would emerge from the Cav to find that no one knew what they were babbling about. Ocean bloom? We solved that ages ago. So they would be madmen, a curious trio sharing a common delusion. Yet to be consistent, the equations said that sending the message couldn't have too great an effect. It couldn't cut off the very reason for sending the tachyons in the first place. So there had to be some self-consistent picture, in which Renfrew still got his initial idea, and approached the World Council and yet ...Markham shook himself out of the mood, feeling an odd chill run through him. There was something deeper here, some crucial missing physics.He walked rapidly away, disturbed. A cricket game lazily wound through the afternoon on the large pie-shaped ground known as Parker's Piece.

The mathematician G. H. Hardy had watched games there a century before, Markham mused, and often lazed away the afternoon just as he was doing now.

Markham could understand the motivation of the game, but not the details. He had never got straight the cricket jargon--square leg, silly mid-on, silly mid-off, cover point, short extra cover--and still never quite knew when a good play was made. He walked behind the ranks of spectators, who were slumped in o 8 Gregory Ben fordtheir canvas chairs, and wondered what the cricket watchers of a century ago would've thought of the England of now. He suspected, though, that like most people even today, they a.s.sumed that tomorrow would be pretty much the same as the present.Markham angled down Regent Street and past the University Botanic Garden. Beyond lay a boys'

school. Dispensing the norms and graces of the upper cla.s.ses, in a king's ancient phrase. He strolled. through the arched entranceway and paused at the school announcements board. The following have lost their personal possessions. They will call at the Prefect's Study by Thursday 4th June.No "please." No unnecessary softenings; simply a direct statement. Markham could imagine the brief conversation: "I'm sorry, you see ""Standard punishment.

Fifty lines, best handwriting. I'll have them tomorrow at break." And the student would grind out, My carelessness with my personal property will cease.The fact that the student might well use one of the recent voice-writers for nearly all his school work didfit matter; the principle 'reigned.Odd, how forms held on when everything else buildings, politics, fame fell away. Maybe that was the strength of this place. There was a timelessness here, too fragile for California's dry air to hold. Now that full summer had arrived with a flourish, the mannered ways of the schools and colleges seemed even older, a slice of worn time. He found his own spirits lifting at the release from the endless raw winter and the rainy spring.He felt his mind veering away from the tachyon question, seeking refuge in this comfortable aura of the past. It was different for him here, he knew.

glishmen were fish swimming in this sea of the past.

For them it was a palpable presence, a living extension, commenting on events like a half-heard stage whisper. Americans regarded the past as a parenthe- 2 o osis within thee running sentences of the present, an aside, someffing out of the flow.He walked back towards the colleges, letting this feel of the press of time seep into him. He and Jan had been to High Table at several of the colleges, the ultimate Anglophile experience. Memorial plate that gleamed .like quicksilver, and crested goblets. In the after-dinner room of polished wood, gilt frames held glowering portxaits of the college founders. In the areat dining hall Jan had been surprised to find decto segregation: Etonians at one table, Harroviansat another, the lesser public schools' alumni at a third, and, finally, state school graduates and everyone else at a morley last table. To an American in such a citadel of education, after the decades of ferocious equality-at-all-costs politics, i seemed strange.

There persisted a reliance on inherited advantages, and even the idea that such a system was an inher-Red virtue as well. The past hung on. You could be quite up to the minute, quite knowing about the zack-o latin riffs of Lady Delicious, and yet sit quietly and comfortably in choir stalls of King's College chapel listening to cherubic lads in Elizabethan ruffs try to sharer the stained gla.s.s with Preble attacks. It seemed that in a muzzy sense the past was still here, that they were all connected, and that the perception of the future as a tangible thing lived in the present, as well.Markham relaxed a moment, leFdng the idea inside drift up from his subconscious. Walking was the gentle jog his mind needed; he had used the effect before. Something ... something about the reality needing to be independent of the observer ...He glanced up. A swarming yellow cloud, moving fast and low over the gray towers, pressed shadows against the flanks of Great St. Mary's church. Bells pealed a cascade of sound through momentarily chilled air; the cloud seemed to suck heat from the breeze.He watched the curling fingers of fog that dis- 2 I o solved overhead in the trail of the cloud. Then, abruptly, he had it. The nub of the problem was that observer, the guy who had to see things objectively.

Who was he? In quantum mechanics, the equations themselves told you nothing about which way time should run. Once you made a measurement, an experiment had to be thought of from that moment on as a thing which generated probabilities. All the equations could tell you was how probable a "later"

event was. That was the essence of the quantum.

Schrdinger's equation could evolve things either forward in time, or backward. Only when the observer poked his finger in and made a measurement did something fix the direction of the flow of time. If the all-powerful observer measured a particle and found it at position x, then the particle had to be given a small push by the observer, in the very act of observing. That was Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

You could not tell precisely how much of a push the observer had given the wretched particle, so its future position was somewhat uncertain. Schr6-dinger's equation described the set of probabilities about where the particle would appear next. The probabilities were found by picturing a wave, moving forward in time and making it possible for the particle to appear in many different places in the future.

A probability wave. The old billiard-ball picture, in which the particle moved with Newtonian certainty to its next point, was simply false, misleading.

The particle's most probable location was, in fact, exactly the same as the Newtonian position--but other paths were possible. Less likely, yes, but possible. The problem came when the observer next poked his finger in and made a second measurement.

He found the particle in one place, not spread out among a choice of spots. Why? Because the observer was always considered essentially NewtonJan himself--a "cla.s.sical measurer," as the tech chat went.

Markham grinned broadly as he turned up King's 2 i I Parade. There was a trapdoor in that argument. The cla.s.sical observer didn't exist. Everything in the world was quantum-mechanical. Everything moved according to waves of probability. So the ma.s.sive, untouched experimenter himself got pushed back on.

He received an uncertainly known push from the outraged particle, and that meant the observer, too, was quantum-mechanical. He was part of the system.

The experiment was bigger, and more complex, than the simple ideas of the past. Everything 'was part of the experiment; n.o.body could stand apart from it.

You could talk about a second observer, bigger than the first one, who was unaffected by the experiment--but that simply removed the problem one step further. The final fallback was to regard the whole universe as the "observer," so that it was a self-consistent system. But that meant you had to solve the entire problem of the motion of the universe at once, without breaking it up into convenient, separate experiments.

The essence of the problem was, what made the particle appear in only One spot? Why did it pick out one of the possible states and not another? It was as though the universe had many possible ways it could go, and something made it choose a particular one.

Markham stopped, studying the dizzy height of Great St. Mary's. A student peered over the edge, a k.n.o.bby head against the steel blue.

What was the right a.n.a.logy?

The tachyon beam brought up the same problem.

If his ideas were right there was a kind of probability wave traveling back and forth in time. Setting up a paradox kept the wave going in a loop, setting the system into a kind of dumbfounded frenzy, unable to decide on what state it should be in. Something had to choose one. Was there some a.n.a.logy here, a kind of unmoved observer, who set time flowing forward rather than backward?

If there was, then the paradox had an answer.

Somehow the laws of physics had to provide an an- 2 !

sWer. But the equations stood mute, inscrutable. As was always the case, the basic question answered by the mathematics was how, not why. Did the unmoved mover have to step in? Who was he G.o.d? He might as well be.Markham shook his head in frustration. The ideas swarmed like bees, but he could not pin them.

Abruptly he growled and swerved across a lane of bicycling students, into Bowes & Bowes.

The selection was getting thin; the publis.h.i.+ng business was in trouble, retreating before the TV fide. A woman tending the register caught his eye; quite s.e.xy. Beyond his age range, though, he thought ruefully.

He was getting to the stage where ambitions nearly always exceeded his region of probable success.The tachyon thing troubled him as he walked home, across the Car and through the bathing grounds. A greensward, named Laminas Land for some ancient reason, lay beneath a moist, warm afternoon.

There was a st'illness, as though the year Were poised motionless at the top of a long slope up which it had climbed out of winter's grip, and from which it must soon descend. He turned south, towards Grantchester, where the nuclear reactor was still a-building. It seemed that with all the delays they would never finish the squashed ping-pong ball that would cup the simmering core. The meadows around it were a pocket of rural peace. Cows standing in the inky shade of trees swished their tails to banish flies. There were drowsy sounds, murmurs of wood pigeons, a drone of a plane, buzzings and clickings. The air was layered with scents of thistles, yarrow, ragwort, tansy. Colors leaped in ambush from the lush gra.s.s: yellow camomile, blue harebells, the scarlet pimpernel of literary fame.Jan was reading when he arrived home. They made a lazy sort of love in the close upper bedroom, 2 ! sdampening the sheets. Afterward, the image of the woman in Bowes & Bowes flickered through his dozing mind. A musky fullness hung in the air. The long day stretched on to ten in the evening, holding off the night. Markham was reminded, as he checked a calculation in the pale late light, that elsewhere on the planet someone else was paying for these longest of summer days in the hard coinage of frozen winter nights. Debts mount, he thought. And as he read that evening of the spreading bloom, it seemed a' vast one was coming due.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

APRIL 8, 1963.

GORDON WAS LATE FOR A FACULTY SENATE COMMITtee meeting, and hurrying, when Bernard Carrowayintersected his trajectory. "Oh, Gaw-dun, I need to speak with you." Something in Bernard's tone made Gordon stop."I heard about this thing you have on with Shriffer. Saw a diddle about it on the late news--one of my students rang me to have a look." Carroway clasped his hands behind his back, the gesture giving him a judicial appearance."Well ... yes, I think Saul went a little overboard---""Glad to hear you say so!" Bernard was suddenly jovial. "I spotted it as a, well, Saul is given to excess in this sort of thing, you know." He peered at Gor-don for confirmation."Sometimes.""Couldn't imagine anything more unlikely, my-self--nuclear magnetic resonance experiments, he said? b.l.o.o.d.y odd way to communicate."

2 I."Saul thinks part of it, ah, the message, is astronomical coordinates. You'll remember when I came to you--""That's the basis of it, then? Merely some coordinates?""Well, he did break down the pulses into that picture,"

Gordon admitted lamely."Oh, that. Looks for all the world like a child's scrawling to me.""No, there's structure there. As for the content, we don't--""I think you have to be careful in this, Gaw-dun.

Understand, I like some of Shriffer's work. But I and others in the astronomical community feel he's, well perhaps rather overstepped himself in this radio communication thing. And now this!--finding messages in nuclear resonance experiments! I think Shriffer's quite exceeded the bounds."Bernard nodded seriously and peered down at his feet. Gordon wondered what to say. Bernard had a gravity about him that warded off direct contradiction.

He carried his excess weight with an aggressive energy that seemed to dare anyone to make anything of it. He was short with the kind of barrel chest which, when he relaxed, would suddenly reveal itself to be merely an elevated stomach, held aloft with resolve.

It sagged now as Gordon watched; Bernard had forgotten it in his concentration on the sins of Shriffer. His herr'mgbone jacket bulged, the b.u.t.tons strained. Gordon imagined he could hear Bernard's belt creak with the sudden new pressure. This torture of his wardrobe was redeemed by the unconscious flush of pleasure which spread across Bernard's serious face as his belly descended."It puts a black eye on the whole game, you know," Bernard said abruptly, looking up. "Black eye.""I think until we get to the bottomre""The bottom is that Shriffer's foxed you in with him, Gaw-dun. I'm sure none of it was your idea. I'm ! 6 Gregory Ben fordsorry our depatment has to be mixed in with his foolery. You'll put paid to it, if you're wise."This advice delivered, Bernard nodded and walked on.

Cooper glanced up as Gordon came into the laboratory.

"Mornin', how are you?" Cooper said.Gordon reflected sourly that people routinely asked you how you were, as a formal greeting, when in fact they had not the slightest interest. "I feel like c.r.a.p on a soda cracker," Gordon muttered. Cooper frowned, puzzled. "You saw the TV last night?" Gordon asked.Cooper pursed his lips. "Yes," he said, as though he were giving a good deal away."I didn't mean to let it get out of our hands likethat. Shriffer took the ball and ran with it."

"Well, maybe he scored a touchdown."

''You think so?""No," Cooper admitted. He leaned over and adjusted a setting on an osdlloscope, rather obviously having said all he wanted to. Gordon shrugged his shoulders as though they had weights attached. He would not try to puncture Cooper's blithe goyische bra.s.s, so well concealed beneath the cloak of unconcern."Any new data?" Gordon asked, cramming his fists into his pants pockets and paring around the lab, inspecting, feeling a certain private pleasure at the thought that here, at least, he knew what was happening and what mattered."I've got some good resonance lines. I'm carrying on with the measurements we agreed I should make.""Ah, good." See Fm only doing what we agreed I 'should. You won't catch me with an unexpected result,nossir.Gordon paced some more, checking the instruments.

The nitrogen dewar popped with its brittle 2 ! ?.cold, transformers hummed, pumps chugged bovine-ly.

Gordon.-read through Cooper's lab notebook, looking for possible sources of error. He wrote out from memory the simple theoretical expressions which Cooper's data should confirm. The numbers fell rea.s.suringly close to the theoretical mark. Beside Cooper's schoolboy neatness Gordon's sprawling handwriting seemed a raffishly human intrusion on the neat, remorseless rectangularity of the gridded pages. Cooper worked in precise ballpoint; Gordon used a Parker fountain pen, even for quick calculations such as this. He preferred the elegant slick slide and sudden choking death of pens, and the touch of importance their-broad blue lines. gave to a page.

One of the reasons he had switched from white s.h.i.+rts to blue was the doomed hope that ink .stains on the left breast pocket would be easier to conceal.Working this way, standing up amid the careless tangle of the ongoing experiment and scribbling in a notebook, calmed him. For a moment he was again back at Columbia, a son of Israel loyal to Newton's cause. But then he had checked the last of Cooper's numbers and there was nothing more to do. The moment pa.s.sed. He sank back into the world."Do you have the summary I asked you to write up for your candidacy exam?" he asked Cooper."Oh, yeah. Almost done. I'll get it to you tomorrow.""Good. Good." He hesitated, not wanting to leave.

"Say, ah--you haven't got anything but conventional resonance curves? No--""Message?" Cooper smiled very slightly. "No, no message."

Gordon nodded, looked around absently, and left.

He did not return t6 his office, but instead took a roundabout route to the Physical Sciences Library. It was on the ground floor of Building B and had a diffused, temporary air. Everything at UCLJ felt that 2 ! 8 Gregory Ben fordwa compared to Columbia's hallowed corridors, and now there was talk that even the campus name would change. La Jolla was being annexed by the jumble of San Diego. The city council spoke of the savings in fire and police protection, but to Gordon it seemed one more step in the steady h.o.m.ogenizing, the Losangelization of what had before been pleasant and charming distinctions. So UCLJ would become UCSD and something more than a mere name would be lost.He spent an hour browsing through the new crop of physics journals and then looked up a few references relating to a back-burner idea he had let fall by the wayside. After a while he had no more real business and lunch was still an hour away. Somewhat reluctantly he returned to his office, not going up to the third floor to collect the morning mail but instead walking between the Physics and Chemistry buildings, pa.s.sing under the architect's wet dream of a connecting bridge. The graceful pattern of linked hexagons caught the eye, he had to give it that.

Somehow, though, it looked uncomfortably like the scaffolding for some enormous insect's burrow, a design pattern for a future wasp nest.He was unsurprised to see his office door open, for he usually left it that way. The one distinction he had noted in the behavior pattern of humanists vs.

scientists was the matter of doors: humanists dosed them, discouraging casual encounters. Gordon wondered if this had a deep psychological significance, or, more likely, was meant by the humanists to conceal when they were on campus. As nearly as Gordon could tell, the answer was: seldom. They all seemed to work at home.Isaac Lakin was standing in Gordon's office, back to the door, studying the wasp's scaffolding that loomed above. "Oh, Gordon," he murmured, turn-ing, "I've been looking for you.""I can imagine why."Lakin sat on the edge of Gordon's desk; Gordon remained standing. "Oh?"

2 I 9.

"The Shriffer thing."

"Yes." Lakin gazed up at the fluorescents and pursed his lips, as though carefully selecting the right words.