Timescape. Part 24

,,Th e secretary answered meekly, "In Dallas."'.I hope somebody gets Goldwater, then," the twin saicl with sudden vehemence."Quiet, quiet," Gordon said mildly. "There is nothing we can do here, right? I propose to continue."With that he returned to the equation. He got through most of the introductory discussion of the Poynting veCtor, ignoring the buzz of whispers at his back. He fell into the rhythm of the discussion. His stabs with the chalk made their clicking points, one by one. The equations unfolded their beauties. He conjured up electromagnetic waves and endowed them with momentum. He spoke of imaginary mathematical boxes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with light, the'n, flux kept in precise balance by the unseen power of partial differentials.Another stirring at the back of the room. Several students were leaving. Gordon put down his chalk.

"I suppose you can't concentrate under the circ.u.mstances,"

he conceded. "We'll take it up next time."One of the twins got up to leave and said to the other, "Lyndon Johnson. Jesus, we might end up with him."Gordon made his way down to his office and put away his lecture notes. He was tired, but he supposed he should go hunt up a TV and watch. The last week had been a madhouse of interviews, challenges by other physicists, and an astonis.h.i.+ng amount of attention from the networks. He was thoroughly weary of the whole process.He remembered that the student center down by Scripps beach had a TV. The drive down in his Chevy took only moments. There seemed to be few people on the streets.Students were ranked three deep around the set.

As Gordon came in and stood at the back Walter Cronkite was saying, "I repeat, there is still no definite word from Parkland Memorial Hospital about the President. A priest who just left the operating 4 a room was heard to have said that the President was dying. However, that is not an official announcement.

The priest did acknowledge that the last rites have been administered to the President."Gordon asked a student next to him, "What happened?""Some guy shot him from a school book building, they said."Cronkite accepted a piece of paper from off camera.

"Governor John Connally is undergoing treatment in the operating room next to the President.

The doctors working on the governor have said only that he is in serious condition. Meanwhile, Vice Pres-'

ident Johnson is known to be in the hospital. He is apparently waiting in a small room down the corridor from where the President lies. The Secret Service has the area completely surrounded, with the help of the Dallas Police."Gordon noticed several of the students from his cla.s.s gathered nearby. The recreation room was packed now. The crowd was absolutely still as Cronkite paused, listening to a small headset which he pressed to his ear. Through the gla.s.s sliding doors which led out onto a wooden porch Gordon could see the waves breaking into white and sliding up the beach. Outside, the world went on with its unending rhythm. In this small pocket, a flickering color screen held sway.Cronkite glanced off camera and then back. "The Dallas police have just released the name of the man they suspect of the shooting. His name is Lee Oswald. Apparently he is an employee of the School Book Depository building. That's the building that the shots--some said rifle shots, but that has not been confirmed--:came fro. The Dallas police have not released any further information. There are many policemen around that building now and it is very difficult to get any information. However, we do have men on the scene and a television camera is being set up, I am told."

a a o The recreation room was becoming hot. Fall sunlight streamed through the gla.s.s doors. Someone lit a cigarette. The plumes of smoke slOWed and formed blue layers as Cronkite spoke on, repeating himself, waiting for more reports. Gordon began breathing more rapidly, as though the thickened air would not come freely into his lungs. The light became watery, weaving. The crowd around him caught the feeling and moved restlessly, human wheat beneath a strange wind."Some members of-the crowd around Dealey Plaza say there were two shots fired at the Presidential motorcade. There are reports of three and four shots, however. One of our reporters on the scene says the shots came from a window on the sixth story of that School Book Depository--"* The scene suddenly s.h.i.+fted to a'bleak fall landscape in black and white. Knots of people crowded the sidewalk before a brick building. Trees stood out in stark contrast to the bright sky. The camera panned to show a bleached, open plaza. Cars blocked the streets. People milled aimlessly.'qaat is the site of the shooting you are seeing now," Cronkite continued. "There is still no definite word about the President. A nurse in the corridor outside has said that the doctors working on the President has carried out a tracheotomy--that is, a cut in the windpipe, to make another breathing path for the President. This seems to confirm reports that Mr. Kennedy was struck in the back of the neck."Gordon felt ill. He wiped beads of sweat from his brow. He was the only person in the room wearing a jacket and tie. The air felt silky, moist. The odd sensation of a moment before was ebbing slowly away."There is a report that Mrs. Kennedy has been seen in the corridor outside the operating room. We have no indication of what this means." Cronkite was in s.h.i.+rt-sleeves. He looked uncertain and anxious."Back at Dealey Plaza--" Again the crowds, the a $ o brick building, police everywhere. 'Yes, there is a police statement that Oswald has been removed from the area under heavy police guard. We did not see them leave the School Book Depository building, at least not from the front entrance. Apparently they left through the back. Oswald has been inside the building since he was captured there, moments after the shooting. Wait--wait--" On the screen the crowd parted. Men in overcoats and hats moved ahead of a double rank of police, pus.h.i.+ng the crowd back."Someone else is leaving the Depository building, taken by the police. Our camera crew there tells me it is another person involved in the incident, in the capture of the suspect, Lee Oswald. I think I can see him now--"Between the lines of policemen marched a teenager, a boy. He looked around at the press of bodies, appearing dazed. He wore a tan leather jacket and blue jeans. He was well over six feet in height and looked out over the heads of the policemen. His head swiveled around, taking it all in. He had brown hair and wore gla.s.ses that reflected the glaring, slanted sunlight. His head stopped when he saw the camera.

A figure moved into the foreground, holding a microphone.

The police surged to block him. Distantly: "If we could have just a statement, I--"A plainclothesman leading the group shook his head. "Nothing until later, when--""Hey, hold on!" It was the teenager, in a loud, booming voice that stopped everyone. The plain-dothes, man,. a hand raised palm forward toward the camera, looked back over his shoulder."You cops have bugged me enough," the boy said.

He shouldered his way forward. The policemen yielded before him. and concentrated on keeping the crowd back. He reached the plainclothesman. "Look, am I under arrest or what?""Well, no, you're under protective custody--"

"Okay, that's what I thought. See that? What it is, a 5 I is a TV camerda, right? You guys don't have to protect me from that do you?""No, look, Hayes--we wanna get you off the street. There could be ""I tell you that guy was alone up there. There isn't anybody else to worry about. And I'm gonna talk to these TV guys 'cause I'm a free citizen.""You're a minor," the plaindothesman bega hesitantly, "and we have to--""That's a lotta bull. Here "He reached beyond the plainclothesman and grabbed the microphone.

"See?--no trouble." Several people standing nearby applauded. The plainclothesman glanced uncertainly around. He began, "We don't want you giving--"''What happened in there?" someone shouted.

,"A lot!" Hayes shouted back.

"Didja see that guy shooting?""I saw it all, man. Cold-c.o.c.ked the guy, I did." He peered at the camera. "I'm Bob Hayes and I saw it all, I'm here to tell ya. Bob Hayes from Thomas Jefferson High.""How many shots were fired?" an off-camera voice asked, trying to get Hayes on the track of the story."Three. I was walkin' down the hall outside when I heard the first one. The guy downstairs was eatin'

lunch and he sent me up to get some magazines they had stored up there. So I'm lookin' for them and I hear this loud noise."Hayes paused, plainly enjoying this. "Yeah?"

someone said."I knew it was a rifle right off. So I open this door where it came from. I see these chicken bones on a carton, like somebody's havin' lunch. Then I see this guy crouched down and pointin' this rifle out the window. He had it on the sill, to brace it. He wasleaning on some cartons, too.""That was Oswald?""That's what these guys said his name was. Me, I didn't ask." Hayes grinned. Someone laughed.

4 2 "I start over toward this guy and boom he fires again. I can hear somebody yelhng outside. I ddn think about it, I just went for him. Dove over this crate and slammed into him. Just then the rifle goes off again, just as I hit him. I used to play some foot-ball y'know, an' I know how to take a guy out."

"You got the rifle away from him?"Hayes grinned again. "h.e.l.l no, man. I mashed him up against that window sill. Then I leaned back to get some room an' I gave him a good one up side the head. He forgot all about that rifle, right then. So I hit him again and he went all gla.s.sy-eyed. Hisnumber was up, man.""He was out cold?""Sure was. I do good work, fella."'q?hen the police arrived.""Yeah, once this guy was out, I looked out the window. Saw all these cops lookin' up at me. Waved to 'em and called down to tell 'em where I was. They got up there right away.""Could you see the President's Lincoln speeding away?""I didn't know there was any President. Just a lot of traffic, that's all. Some kind of parade, I thought.

For Thanksgiving or somethin', y'know. I came down here because Mr. Aiken, our physics teacher, sent me on down."The crowd around Hayes was utterly silent. The boy was a born performer, beaming straight into the camera and playing to the audience. The off-camera questioner asked, "You realize that you may have prevented a successful attempt on the life of the--"''Yeah, that's amazin'. Great. But y'know, I didn't have any idea about that. Didn't even know he was in town. Woulda gone downstairs to see him and Jackie if I'd known,""You had not seen Oswald before? You had no sign that he had a rifle and---""Look, like I said, I was down here to get some magazines. Mr. Aiken is doin' this special two-day a $ 3extra-credit .project in our college level physics course, the PST one. It was on the stuff in this magazine, Senior Scholastic. Mr. Aiken, he had me come down here to get 'em for the cla.s.s this afternoon.

There was somethin' about y'know this ah, signal from the future an'--"'q?he shots---how many of them hit?"

"Hit what?"

'q'he President!""h.e.l.l, I dunno. He got off two of 'eln okay. I socked him good just before the third."Hayes grinned, looking around, beaming. The plainclothesman tugged at his arm. "I believe that''

enough, Mr. Hayes," he said, using another tactic.

"There will be a press conference later."* "Oh, yeah," Hayes said affably. His momentum was spent for the moment. He was still transfixed by beirtg the center of attention. "Yeah, I'll tell it all later."More shouted questions. A blur of motion as the police formed a wedge for Hayes. Clicking of cameras.

Calls to clear the way. A rumble as a motorcycle started. Flickering images of men in overcoats pus.h.i.+ng, mouths twisted.Gordon blinked and for a moment he seemed to lose his balance. Senior Scholastic. The rec room swam in its pale, musty light.Then Cronkite was talking again in that reedy voice. At Parkland Memorial Hospital a brief press conference had just concluded, while Hayes was speaking. Malcolm Kilduff, a.s.sistant press secretary to the President, had described the wound. A bullet had entered the lower back of the President's neck. It had pa.s.sed through and left a small exit wound. The entry wound was larger and bled freely. The President had received several pints of O RH negative blood as well as 300 mg. hydrocortisone intravenously.

At first the attending physicians had inserted a tube to clear the President's breathing pa.s.sage. This failed. The senior physician, Michael Cosgrove, ', 5 , elected to perform a tracheotomy. This took five minutes.

Lactated Ringer's solution--a modified saline solution--was fed into the right leg via catheter. The President began breathing well, though he was still in coma. His dilated eyes were open and staring directly into a glaring fluorescent lamp overhead. A nasogastric tube was thrust through Kennedy's nose and fitted behind his trachea, to dear away possible sources of nausea in his stomach. Bilateral chest tubes were placed in both chest pleural s.p.a.ces to suck out damaged tissue and prevent lung collapse.

The President's heartbeat was weak but regular. The exit wound was treated first, since the President was on his back. Three doctors then rolled the body onto its side. The entry wound gaped, larger than the exit wound by more than twice, and was the. princ.i.p.al point of blood loss. It was treated without difficulty.

Kennedy was still in Trauma Room No. I of Parkland as Kilduff spoke. His condition appeared stable.

There was no apparent damage to the brain. His right lung was bruised. His windpipe was ripped apart. It appeared that, barring complications, he would live.

Mrs. Kennedy was not hit. Governor Connally was in critical condition. The Vice President was not hit. The attending physicians could make no comment on the number of shots fired. It was clear, however, that only one bullet had struck the President.The crowd around the television murmured and stirred. The sensation of lightness and pressing heat had gone. Objects no longer swayed as though seen underwater, refracted. Gordon shouldered his way through the close-packed students. Speculations buzzed around him. He slid aside the gla.s.s door to the wooden deck and stepped through. Without thinking he vaulted over the railing and out onto the parking lot. He got his running gear out of the trunk of the Chevy. He changed in the nearby men's room.

a s s In shorts and tennis shoes he looked as young as many of the students still flocking to the rec room in search of news. He felt an airy sense of liberation and a humming, random energ55 almost pleasurable. He did not want to think just now.He began to run on the flat, watery sand. A steady breeze came in, blowing strands of black hair across * his eyes. He ran with his head down, watching his feet strike. When his heel hit the sand a pale circle leaped into being as the water rushed out, 'driven by the impact. The beach hardened under each step, upholding him, and dissolved back to a gray slate sameness behind him. A helicopter pa.s.sed whurnp whurnp whump overhead.He skirted the town and ran through crescent coves, heading south, until he reached Nautilus Street. Penny was grading papers. He told her the news. She wanted to turn on the radio, learn more, but he tugged her away. Reluctantly she went with him. They went to the beach and walked south. Neither spoke. Penny fidgeted, face cloudy. The sea breeze scuffed the tops from the whitecaps and furled a banner of foam from each. Gordon looked at them and thought about them coming across the Pacific, driven by tides and winds. They were shallow out in the ocean and moved fast. As they neared the land the sea bed reared up beneath them and they deepened and slowed. Coming in, a wave moved faster at the top than at the bottom and they toppled forward, the energy from out of Asia churning into turbulence.Penny called to him. She was already charging into the shallows. He followed. It was the first time'

he had tried this but that did not matter. They swam out beyond the waves and waited for the next big one to come in. It moved with stately slowness. The dark blue line thickened and rose and Gordon looked at it and estimated where it would break. He pulled forward, stroking fast and kicking. Penny was ahead.

He felt something picking him up and the water a 6 ahead fell away. A rus.h.i.+ng sound, and he moved faster. He flung out his arms and leaned to the left.

Spray hazed his eyes. He blinked. He cut down the face of the wave, cupped in a wall of water, curling and churning toward the sh.o.r.e.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE.

1'998.

JOHN RENFREW WORKED THROUGH THE NIGHT. HE.had the temporary power supply going and he was d.a.m.ned if he'd stop while the fuel held out. If he stopped he could not be sure of getting it started again. Better to go on and see what would happen.

Then he could have no regrets.He grimaced. See what would happen? Or had hap.ened?

Or could happen? Human language did not fit the lhysics. There was no tense of the verb to be that retlected the looping sense of time. No way to turn the language on the pivot of physics, to apply a torque that would make the paradoxes dissolve into an ordered cycle, endlessly turning.He had let the technicians go. They were needed at home. Outside, on the Coton footpath, no bicycles, no movement. Families were home, tending the ill, or else had fled to the countryside. He felt a twinge of the dysentery that had come in the night. A brush with the gnawing stuff from the clouds, he guessed.

He had been drinking from a store of bottled fruit a s s Gregory Ben forddrinks he'd found in the cafeteria, and eating packaged foods. For two days he'd been here, alone, not pausing to go home for a change of clothes. The world as he had lived in it was closing down, that much was clear from the windows of the lab. Since early morning a plume of oily smoke had furled upward in the distance; obviously no one was trying to put it out.He tuned the apparatus gingerly. Tap tap. Tap tap.

The tachyon noise level remained constant. He had been transmitting the new message about the neurojacket process for days now, mixing it with the RA and DEC monotony. Peterson had phoned new biological sentences in from his London office. The man had sounded strained and hurried. The content of the message, as nearly as Renfrew could understand it, explained why. If the California group was right, this thing could spread through the cloud-seed . mechanism with blinding speed.Renfrew tapped patiently on his Morse key, ho ing he had the focusing right. It was so b.l.o.o.d.y difi-cult to know if you had the rig aimed. A slight error in targeting the beam put it at the wrong x, and thus at the wrong t. He had got through once, that they'd learned from Peterson's bank vault. But how could he check now, if the pulsing coils were a microsecond slow, or the fringing fields throwing the beam a deree to the left? He had only his sandy-eyed calibrations to trust. He was adrift here, m a world where t was time and tea was brine and x for s.p.a.ce, x for the unknown floated in the air before him, a pa.s.sing pattern.He shook himself. The lab stool pinched his b.u.t.tocks.

He had less fat there, now; must have lost weight. Have to put on some extra ballast, yes.Tap tap tap. Out Went the Morse cadences. Tap tap.

Maybe the weight loss explained why the room rippled and stretched as he watched. Christ, he was tired. A wan anger welled up in him. He had been taptaptapping out biological stuff and coordinates and a 5 othe lot, all impersonal and--he was sure of it now--in the .end, all useless. b.l.o.o.d.y boring, it was.

He reached over and took up the identifying pa.s.sage he had been transmitting regularly, and began sending it again. But this time he added a few comments of his own, about how this whole thing got started, and Markham's ideas, and Peterson the stiff-faced b.a.s.t.a.r.d, and the lot, all the way up to Markham's crash. It felt good to get it all down, pus.h.i.+ng the words out in Morse as he thought of them, He told it in ordinary sentences, not the clipped telegraph style they'd adopted for compressing the biological information. It was a relief to tell it, really. The whole sodding thing was pointless, the beam was pouring down some unsuspected cosmic rathole, anyway, so why not enjoy the last shot? Tap tap. Here's my life'

story, mate, written on the head of a pin. Tap tap. Into the void. Tap tap.But after a while the momentum left him and he stopped. His shoulders sagged.The scope screen rippled and the tachyon noise level rose. Renfrew peered at it. Tap tap. On impulse he flipped off the transmitting switch. The past be d.a.m.ned for a moment. He watched the scramble of curves arc and intersect, dancing. For brief s.n.a.t.c.hes of time the noise resolved into these snakings across the screen. Signals, clearly. Someone else was transmitting.Regular jolts of wave forms, evenly s.p.a.ced. Renfrew copied them.

ATTEMPT CONTACT FROM 2349 n TAC and a blur of noise again, swallowing all.English. Somebody sending in English. From the year 2349? Perhaps. Or maybe with tachyons in the 234.9 kilovolt range. Or maybe it was a fluke, a sport.Renfrew slurped Cold coffee. He had made a thermos days ago and forgotten it. He hoped the water was okay. The coffee hadn't the dog's fur flavor he ao * Gregory Ben fordremembered; more like scorched earth. He shrugged and drank it without thinking further.He felt his brow. Sweat. A fever. A strange, distant mutter came to him. Voices? He went to look, surprised at his weakness, at the lurking ache in his ankles and thighs. Should get more exerdse, he thought automatically, and then laughed. Scuffling nxises.

Had they heard him? He lurched down a corridor.

But there was nO one about. Only the sound of the wind. That, and the gritty sc.r.a.ping of his own shoes on the bare concrete.He went back and stared at the scope. His throat burned. He tried to think calmly and cleanly about what Markham had said so long ago. The micro-universes were not like black holes, not in the sense that inside them all matter was compressed into infinite densities. Instead, their average density was a reasonable number, though higher than ours. They had formed in the early moments of the universe and been forever isolated, living out microlives inside a folded geometry. Wickham's new field equations showed they were out there, between the cl.u.s.ters ofoalaxies. An x and t we cannot see, he thought, apart m me and thee. Now there was a literary flourish for aOU, worthy of the last edition of the Times. The veryst edition.Abruptly he sat, feeling dizzy. An ache behind his eyes, spreading. Matter was swallowed into the net of s.p.a.ce-time, of differential geometries. G times n. A tachyon could wing out of the knots, a free phoenix, its flight ordained by the squiggles and jots of Markham and Wickham. Renfrew s.h.i.+vered as the cold seeped into him.Another set of bursts. He scribbled them on a pad.

The scratching pen cut the silence.

MENT ENHANCE RESONANCE STRUCTURE BY TUNING TO.

SIDEBAND CARRIER.

and then the sea of noise again, the waves lost.

a I This all meant something to someone, but who?

Where? When? Another:AMSK WEDLRUF XSMDOPRDHTU AS WTEU WEHRTU.Wrong language? A code from across the galaxy, from across the universe? This apparatus opened up communication with everywhere, everywhen, instantly.

Talk to the stars. Talk to the compressed beings inside a dot of s.p.a.ce. A telegram from Andromeda would take less time than one from London. Tachyons sleeted through the laboratory, through Renfrew, bringing word. It was within their grasp, if only they had time ...

He shook his head. All form and structure was eroded by the overlapp'mg of many voices, a chorus.

Everyone was talking at once and no one could hear.

The roughing pumps coughed. Tachyons of size 10-3 centimeters were flas.h.i.+ng across whole universes, across 1028 centimeters of cooling matter, in less time than Renfrew's eye took to absorb aphoton of the pale laboratory light. All distances and times were wound in upon each other, singularities sucking up the stuff of creation. Event ho .rizons rippled and worlds coiled into worlds. There were Voices in this room, voices clamoring, touching-- . Renfrew stood up and suddenly clutched at a scope mount for support. Christ, the fever. It clawed at him, ran glowing smoke fingers through his mind.

ATTEMPT CONTACT FROM 2349. All thought of reaching the past was gone now, he realized, blinking.

The room veered, then righted itself. With Markham gone and the Wickham woman missing for days, there was no longer even any hope of understanding what had happened. Causality's leaden hand would win out. The soothing human world of flowing time would go on, a Sphinx yielding none of her secrets. An infinite series of grandfathers would live out their lives safe from Renfrew.

ATTEMPT CONTACT, the scope sputtered again.

4 2 But unless he knew where and When they were, there was no hope of answering.h.e.l.lo, 2349. h.e.l.lo out there. This is 1998, an x and t in your memory. h.e.l.lo. ATTEMPT CONTACT.Renfrew smiled with flinty irony. Whispers came flitting, embedding soft words of tomorrow in the in-dium.

Someone was there. Someone brought hope.The room was cold. Renfrew huddled by his instruments, perspiring, peering at the bursts of waves.

He was like a South Sea islander, watching the airplanes draw their stately lines across the sky, unable to shout up to them. I am here. h.e.l.lo, 2349. h.e.l.lo.He was trying a modification of the signal correlator when the lights winked out. Utter blackness rushed in. The distant generator rattled and chugged into silence.It took a long time to feel his way out and into the light. It was a bleak, gray noon, but he did not notice; it was enough to be outside.He could hear no sound from Cambridge at all.

The breeze carried a sour tang. No birds. No aircraft.He walked south, towards Grantchester. He looked back once at the low square profile of the Cav and in the diffused light he raised a hand to it. He thought of the nested universes, onion skin within onion skin. Leaning back, head swimming, he peered at the clouds, once so benign a sight. Above that cloak was the galaxy, a great swarm of colored lights, turning with majestic slowness in the great night.

Then he looked down at the b.u.mpy, worn footpath and felt a great weight lift from him. For so long now he had been transfixed by the past. It had deadened him to this real world around him. He knew, now, without knowing quite how he knew, that it was forever lost. Rather than feeling despair, he was elated, free.Marjorie lay up ahead, no doubt frightened to be alone. He remembered her preserves on the uncompromising straight shelving, and smiled. They could eat those for some time. Have some easy meals to- a 6 3gether, as they did in the days before the children.

They would soon have to go to the countryside and get Johnny and Nicky, of course.Puffing slightly, his head clearing, he walked along the deserted path. There was really quite a lot ahead to do, when you thought about it.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX.

OCTOBER 28, ! 974.

HE WALKED FROM HIS HOTEL ON CONNECTICUT AVE-.nue. The reception was to be a buffet lunch, the letter said, so Gordon had slept in until eleven. He had long ago learned that on short trips to the east it was best to grant nothing to the myth of time zones, and keep to his western schedule. Invariably this fit the demands on an out-of-town visitor anyway, since such occasions were excuses for lingering over sauce-drenched entrees in expensive restaurants, followed by earnest, now-that-we're-away-from-the-office-I-can-speak-frankly revelations over several cups of coffee, and then late night stumblings-to-bed. Arising at ten the next morning seldom got him to the NSF or AEC later than the executives themselves, since he ate no breakfast.He tramped through the city zoo; it was more or less along the way. Yellow canine eyes followed him, contemplating the results if the bars were suddenly lifted. Chimps swung in pendulum strokeson an un ending circuit of their cramped universe. The natural a 6 5 world was a pocket here amid distant honks and looming, square profiles of sour brown brick. Gordon savored the clammy fullness of the breeze that had tunneled its way up from the Potomac. He welcomed this traveler's brush with the seasons, punctuations to the extended sentences of the months, a welcome relief from California's monotonous excellence.

He had first come here with his mother and father.

That tourist's...o...b..t was now a dim set of memories from a corner of his preadolescence, the perigd of life that he supposed was everybody's golden age..He remembered be'rag awed at the sleek white glow of the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument and the White House. For years afterward he was certain these solemn edifices were what was meant when his grammar school cla.s.s sang "America" and chorused about alabaster majesties. "The country, it really begins in Was.h.i.+ngton,"

his mother had said, not forgetting to add the fpedagogical "D.C.," so that her son would never con-use it with the state. And Gordon, towed through the list of historic shrines, saw what she meant. Beyond the Frenchified design of the city center lay a rural park, land that breathed of Jefferson and tree-traced boulevards. To him Was.h.i.+ngton had ever since been the entranceway to a vast republic where crops sprouted under a WASP sun. There, blue-eyed blonds drove yellow roadsters that left dust plumes on the open roads as they roared from one country fair to the next, women won prizes for strawberry preserves and men drank watery beer and kissed girls who had been struck from the template of Doris Day. He had gazed upward at the Spirit of St. Louis hanging like a paralyzed moth in the Smithsonian, and wondered how a cornhusker city--"without a single good college in it," his mother sniffed--could flap wings and scoot aloft.

Gordon thrust his hands into his pockets for warmth and walked. The corners of his mouth perked up in an airy mirth. He had learned a lot about the huge country beyond Was.h.i.+ngton, most of 4 Gregory Ben ford it from Penny. Their mutual abrasions had healed over in the aftermath of 1963 and they had found again the persistent chemistry that had first drawn them into their mutual bound orbits, circles centered on a point midway between them. The thing between them was not a geometric dot but rather a small sun, igniting between them a pa.s.sion Gordon felt was deeper than anything that had happened to him before.

They were married in late 1964. Her father, just plain Jack, put on a ma.s.sive wedding, glittery and champagne-steeped. Penny wore the traditional white. She made a downward-turning leer whenever anyone mentioned it. She had come with him to Was.h.i.+ngton that winter, when he was making his first big presentation to the NSF for a major grant of his own. His talk went well and Penny fell in love with the National Gallery, going every day to see the Vermeers. Together they ate sh.e.l.lfish with luminaries from the NSF and strolled down from the Congressional dome to the Lincoln Monument. They did not mind the raw, cold damp then; it went with the scenery.

Everything had seemed to go with everything else.

Gordon checked the address and found that he had another block to go. He had always been intrigued by the co1trasts of Was.h.i.+ngton. This busy street brimmed with its own importance, yet intersecting it were thinner avenues of small shops, decaying houses, and corner grocery stores. Old black men leaned in doorways, their large brown eyes surveying the tax-funded bustle. Gordon waved to one and, turning a corner, discovered a mammoth courtyard.

It had the austere French style of 1950s Government Cla.s.sical, with conical evergreens standing like sentries at the abrupt, uncompromising comers. Regimented bushes led the eye, willing or not, into remorseless perspectives.

Well, he thought, blocky and self-important architecture or no, this was it. He teetered back on his heels to look. Granite facings led upward into a a 6 7 bland sky. He took his hands out of his pockets and brushed hair 'back from his eyes. Already there was the giveaway thinning of the crown, he knew, sure sign that his father's baldness would find echo in his own forties.He pushed open a series of three gla.s.s doors. The s.p.a.ces between seemed to serve as air locks, preserving inside a dry heat. Ahead were tables with luxuriant linen draped over them. In the center of the carpeted foyer, knots of suited men. Gordori pushed through the last air lock and into a hushed buzz of talk. Thick drapes swallowed sounds, giving the air a solemnity found in mortuaries. To the left, a band of receptionists. One detached herself and came toward him. She was wearing a long, cream-colored silky thing Gordon would have taken for an evening gown if it were not midda3a She asked for his name. He gave it slowly. "Oh," she said, eyes round, and went to one of the draped tables. She returned with a name tag, not the usual plastic, but a st.u.r.dy wooden flame housing a stark white board with his name in calligraphy. She pinned it on him. 'qNe do want our guests to look their best today," she said with abstract concern; and brushed imaginary lint from his coat sleeve. Gordon warmed at the attention and forgave her efficient gloss. Other men, all suited, most in basic bureaucratic black, were filling the foyer. The receptionists met them with a volley of name tags--plastic, he noted--and seating a.s.signments and admission cards. In a corner a woman who looked like an executive secretary helped a flail white-haired man from his immense, weighty overcoat. He moved with delicate, hesitant gestures, and Gordon recognized him as Jules Chardaman, the nuclear physicist who had discovered some particle or other and received a n.o.bel for his trouble. I thought he was dead, Gordon mused."Gordon! Tried to call you last night," called a brisk voice behind him.

a 6 8 Gregory Ben ford He turned, hesitated, and shook hands with SaulShriffer. "I got in late and went out for a walk.""In this town?""It seemed safe."Saul shook his head. "Maybe they don't mugdreamers.""I probably don't look prosperous enough."-.

' "NaSaul flashed hs nationally known smile.

,.you're looking great. Hey, how's the wife? She with you?""Oh, she's fine. She's been visiting her parents---you know, showing off the kids. She's flying in this morning, though." He glanced at his watch. "Should be here soon.""Hey, great, like to see her again. How about dinner tonight?""So , we've got plans" GOrdon realized he had stud thxs too qmckly and added, Maybe tomorrow, though. How long will you be in town?""I have to zip over to New York by noon. I'll catchyou next time I'm on the coast.""Fine."Saul unconsciously pursed his lips, as though considering how to put his next sentence. "You know, those parts of the old messages you kept to yourself ..."Gordon kept his face blank. "Just the names, that's all. My public statement is that they were lost in thenoise. Which is artly true"p *.

"Yeah." Saul studied his face. "Look, after all this much time, it seems to me look, it would make a really interesting sidelight on the whole thing.""No. Come on, Saul, we've had this discussion before.""It's been years. ! fail to see ""I'm not sure I' got the names right. A letter here and there and you've got the wrong name and the wrong people.""But look--""Forget it. I'm never going to release the parts I'm a onot sure about." Gordon smiled to take the edge off his voice. There are oher reasons, too, but he wasn't going to go into that.Saul shrugged goodnaturedly and fingered his newly grown moustache. "Okay, okay. Just thought I'd give it a try, catch you in a mellow mood. How're the experiments going?",We're still hammering away at the sensitivity.

You know how it is.""Getting any signals?""Can't say. The hash is unbelievable."Saul frowned. 'qThere should be something there."

"Oh, there is.""No, I mean besides that stuff you got back in '67.

I'll grant you that was a clear message. But it wasn'tin any code or language we know.""The universe is a big place."''you they were from a long way off?"

"Look, anything I say is pure guess. But it was a strong signal, tightly beamed. We were able to show that the fact that it lasted three days and then shut off was due to the earth pa.s.sing through a tachyon beam. I'd say we just got in the way of somebody else's communications net.""Ummm." Saul pondered this. "Y'know, if we could only be sure those messages we can't decode weren't from a human transmitter, far up in the future ..."Gordon grinned. Saul was one of the biggest names in science now, at least in the public eye. His popularizations made the bestseller lists, his television series ran in prime time. Gordon finished for him, "You mean, we'd have proof of an alien technology""Sure. Worth trying, isn't it?""Maybe so."The big bronze doors at the end of the 'foyer swung back. The crowd shuffled toward the reception room beyond. Gordon had noted that people in groups move as though by a slow diffusion process, a ? o Gregory Ben fordand this mob was no different. Many he knew---Chet Manahan, a methodical solid state physicist who always wore a vest with matching tie, spoke five languages, and made sure you knew this within a few minutes of meeting him; Sidney Roman, a swarthy6 delicate, thin man whose precise equations led to outrageous conclusions, some of which had proved right; Louisa Schwartz, who, contrary to her name, had luminous white skin and a mind that catalogued everything in astrophysics, including most of the unprintable gossip; George Maklin, red-faced and loud, shoulders rippling with muscle, who carried out experiments suspended by whiskers into liquid helium, measuring wisps of momentum; Douglas Karp, a czar of a rabble of graduate studentg which cranked out two papers a month on the band structure of a.s.sorted solids, enabling him to lecture in sunny summer schools in the Mediterranean; Brian Nantes, with enormous, booming energy which in his papers squeezed into adroit, laconic equations, denuded of commentary or argument with his contemporaries, with a decidedly pearls-before-swine abstract to accompany the text---and many more, some casually met at conferences, others opposed in heated sessions of APS meetings, most of them dim faces a.s.sociated with the stutter of initials beneath interesting papers, or met at a sandwich-and-beer faculty lunch just before delivering a seminar, or seen receiving polite applause at a meeting after they had mumbled an invited paper into a microphone. In this pack Saul drifted away, halfway through describing a plan to ferret out extraterrestrials by the squiggles and beeps in the tachyon spectrum. Gordon could do the observations, see, and Saul would look at the data and see what they meant.Gordon wormed away diagonally, letting a rapidly talking clump of particle physicists come between him and Saul. The buffet lunch lay dead ahead of him. Characteristically, the scientists wasted no time politely hanging back from the self-serve table. Gor- a 7don piled beef on bread and escaped with a presentable sandwich He bit in. The sting of the horseradish cleared his sinuses, watering his eyes. The punch was a superior grade of champagne diluted with pungent orange juice.Shriffer was surrounded now by a crescent of approving faces. It was odd, how celebrity invaded science these days, so that appearing on the Johnny Carson show was more effective with the NSF than publis.h.i.+ng a brilliant series of papers in Ph)sical Review.Yet in the end it was media fixation that had done it all, Gordon reflected. At the conclusion of the press conference of Ramsey and Hussinger, Gordon had felt the constricting heat flow through him and seem to .wash through the air. Then, watching Cronkite talk grimly into the camera on November 22, he had felt it again. Was that the signature of a true, unavoidable paradox? Was that when the future had radically altered? There was no way to tell, at least not yet. He had pored over records of atmospheric phenomena, of cosmic ray counts, of radio noise and starlight fluence---and found nothing. There were no insh'uments yet designed which cotfid meas'e the effect. Gordon felt, though, that he had a subjective perception of when it had happened. Perhaps because he was close to the site where the paradoxes were driven home? Or because he was already strung out, as PEnny would've put it, that is, fine-tuned?

He might never know.A pa.s.sing face nodded. "Quite a day," Isaac Lakin said formally, and moved on. Gordon nodded. The remark was suitably ambiguous. Lakin had become a director at the NSF, shepherding the magnetic reso-nafice work. Gordon's controversial area, tachyon detection, was under another man. Lakin was now best known for his coauthors.h.i.+p of the "spontaneous resonance"

paper in PRL. The refracted frame had lifted him, agreeably buoyant, into his present position.The other coauthor, Cooper, had done reasonably a 7 2 Gregory Ben fordwell, too. His thesis went through the committee with slick speed, once stripped of the spontaneous resonance effects. He had gone off to Penn State with evident relief. There, postdoccing his way through some respectable electron spin work led to a faculty position. He was now safely worrying various III-V compounds into yielding up their transport coefficients.

Gordon saw him at meetings and they had an occasional drink together, sharing wary conversation.He eavesdropped on gossip about revival of the Orion s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p idea, and new work by Dyson.

Then, as Gordon was fetching another sandwich and talking to a reporter, a particle physicist approached.

He wanted to talk over plans for a new accelerator which had a chance of producing a tachyon cascade.

The energy required was enormous. Gordon listened politely. When a revealing skeptical smile began to spread over his face, he forced his lips back into an expression of professorial consideration. The high-energy types were struggling to make tachyons now, but most outside observers felt the effort was premature.

Better theory was needed. Gordon had chaired several panels on the subject and had grown thick-skinned about new, big-money proposals. The particle physicists were addicted to their immense accelerators. The man who has only a hammer to work with finds that every new problem needs a Gordon nodded, looked sage, sipped champagne, said little. Though the evidence for tachyons was now overwhelming, they did not fit into the standard ongoing program of physics. They were more than simply a new species of particle. They couldn't be put on the shelf beside the mesons and hyperons and kaons. Before this physicists had, with the instincts of accountants, decomposed the world into a comfortable zoology. The other, simpler particles had only minor differences. They fit into the universe like marbles in a sack, filling but not altering the fabric.