Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (458 page)

(1941– )

Even after more than forty years as a successful hard SF writer, Gregory Benford remains a working scientist. A faculty member at the University of California at Irvine since 1971, and a full professor since 1979, Benford researches plasma turbulence and astrophysics. One thing readers particularly identify with in his stories is that the characters who are scientists think and act like real scientists, which is less common in SF than you might suspect.

An Army brat who mostly grew up in Alabama, but also spent time in Japan and Germany, Benford created the SF fanzine
Void
with his identical twin brother James when they were fourteen.He sold his first story, “Stand-In” to F&SF while he was finishing his PhD at the University of California at San Diego. From that point on he has published regularly, both on his own and in frequent collaboration with other writers, including Gordon Eklund, William Rotsler, David Brin, and Arthur C. Clarke. One of those collaborations, “If the Stars Are Gods” with Gordon Eklund, won a Nebula in 1974. In addition to his fiction, Benford has published over 150 scientific papers and regularly wrote popular science essays for
Amazing
from 1969–76.

Benford’s breakthrough novel was
Timescape
in 1980, which won a Nebula, a Campbell Award, a British Science Fiction Award, and the Ditmar (Australian) Award for Best International Fiction. Like most of Benford’s work, it’s built around a hard science concept, in this case communication through time using tachyons.

A recipient of the United Nations Medal for Literature, Benford has been Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Benford was married for thirty-five years to art educator Joan Abbe, who died in 2002.

First published in
Jim Baen’s Universe
, June 2006

Ralph slid into the booth where Irene was already waiting, looking perky and sipping on a bottle of Snapple iced tea. “How’d it…” she let the rest slide away, seeing his face.

“Tell me something really awful, so it won’t make today seem so bad.”

She said carefully, “Yes sir, coming right up, sir. Um…” A wicked grin. “Once I had a pet bird that committed suicide by sticking his head between the cage bars.”

“W-what…?”

“Okay, you maybe need worse? Can do.” A flash of dazzling smile. “My sister forgot to feed her pet gerbils, so one died. Then, the one that was alive ate its dead friend.”

Only then did he get that she was kidding, trying to josh him out of his mood. He laughed heartily. “Thanks, I sure needed that.”

She smiled with relief and turned her head, swirling her dirty-blonde hair around her head in a way that made him think of a momentary tornado. Without a word her face gave him sympathy, concern, inquiry, stiff-lipped support—all in a quick gush of expressions that skated across her face, her full, elegantly lipsticked red mouth collaborating with the eggshell blue eyes.

Her eyes followed him intently as he described the paper he had found that left his work in the dust.

“Astronomy is about getting there first?” she asked wonderingly.

“Sometimes. This time, anyway.” After that he told her about the talk with the department chairman—the whole scene, right down to every line of dialog, which he would now remember forever, apparently—and she nodded.

“It’s time to solicit letters of recommendation for me, but to who? My work’s already out of date. I…don’t know what to do now,” he said. Not a great last line to a story, but the truth.

“What do you feel like doing?”

He sighed. “Redouble my efforts—“

“When you’ve lost sight of your goal?” It was, he recalled, a definition of fanaticism, from a movie.

“My goal is to be an astronomer,” he said stiffly.

“That doesn’t have to mean academic, though.”

“Yeah, but NASA jobs are thin these days.” An agency that took seven years to get to the moon the first time, from a standing start, was now spending far more dollars to do it again in fifteen years.

“You have a lot of skills, useful ones.”

“I want to work on fundamental things, not applied.”

She held up the cap of her Snapple iced tea and read from the inner side with a bright, comically forced voice, “Not a winner, but here’s your Real Fact # 237. The number of times a cricket chirps in 15 seconds, plus 37, will give you the current air temperature.”

“In Fahrenheit, I’ll bet,” he said, wondering where she was going with this.

“Lots of ‘fundamental’ scientific facts are just that impressive. Who cares?”

“Um, have we moved on to a discussion of the value of knowledge?”

“Valuable to
who
, is my point.”

If she was going to quote stuff, so could he. “Look, Mark Twain said that the wonder of science is the bounty of speculation that comes from a single hard fact.”

“Can’t see a whole lot of bounty from here.” She gave him a wry smile, another hair toss. He had to admit, it worked very well on him.

“I
like
astronomy.”

“Sure, it just doesn’t seem to like you. Not as much, anyway.”

“So I should…?” Let her fill in the answer, since she was full of them today. And he doubted the gerbil story.

“Maybe go into something that rewards your skills.”

“Like…?”

“Computers. Math. Think big! Try to sign on with a hedge fund, do their analysis.”

“Hedge funds…” He barely remembered what they did. “They look for short-term trading opportunities in the market?”

“Right, there’s a lot of math in that. I read up on it online.” She was sharp, that’s what he liked about her. “That data analysis you’re doing, it’s waaay more complicated than what Herb Linzfield does.”

“Herb…?”

“Guy I know, eats in the same Indian buffet place some of us go for lunch.” Her eyes got veiled and he wondered what else she and Herb had talked about. Him? “He calculates hedges on bonds.”

“Corporate or municipal?” Just to show he wasn’t totally ignorant of things financial.

“Uh, I think corporate.” Again the veiled eyes.

“I didn’t put in six years in grad school and get a doctorate to—”

“I know, honey,” eyes suddenly warm, “but you’ve given this a real solid try now.”

“A
try
? I’m not done.”

“Well, what I’m saying, you can do other things. If this doesn’t…work out.”

Thinking, he told her about the labyrinths of academic politics. The rest of the UC Irvine astro types did nearby galaxies, looking for details of stellar evolution, or else big scale cosmological stuff. He worked in between, peering at exotic beasts showing themselves in the radio and microwave regions of the spectrum. It was a competitive field and he felt it fit him. So he spelled out what he thought of as The Why. That is, why he had worked hard to get this far. For the sake of the inner music it gave him, he had set aside his personal life, letting affairs lapse and dodging any longterm relationship.

“So that’s why you weren’t…connected?…when you got here.” She pursed her lips appraisingly.

“Yeah. Keep my options open, I figured.”

“Open for…?”

For this—“ he swept a rueful, ironic hand in the air at his imaginary assets. For a coveted appointment, a heady way out of the gray postdoc grind—an Assistant Professorship at UC Irvine, smack on the absurdly pricey, sun-bleached coast of Orange County. He had beaten out over a hundred applicants. And why not? He was quick, sure, with fine-honed skills and good connections, plus a narrow-eyed intensity a lot of women found daunting, as if it whispered:
careerist, beware
. The skies had seemed to open to him, for sure…

But that was then.

He gave her a crinkled smile, rueful, and yet he felt it hardening. “I’m not quitting. Not now.”

“Well, just think about it.” She stroked his arm slowly and her eyes were sad now. “That’s all I meant…”

“Sure.” He knew the world she inhabited, had seen her working spreadsheets, reading biographies of the founding fathers and flipping through books on “leadership,” seeking clues about rising in the buoyant atmosphere of business.

“Promise?” Oddly plaintive.

He grinned without mirth. “You know I will.” But her words had hurt him, all the same. Mostly by slipping cool slivers of doubt into his own mind.

* * * *

Later that night, he lay in her bed and replayed the scene. It now seemed to define the day, despite Irene’s strenuous efforts.

Damn,
Ralph had thought.
Scooped!

And by Andy Lakehurst, too.
He had bit his lip and focused on the screen, where he had just gotten a freshly posted paper off the Los Alamos library web site, astro-ph.

The radio map was of Ralph’s one claim to minor fame, G369.23–0.82. The actual observations were stunning. Brilliant, clear, detailed. Better than his work.

He had slammed his fist on his disk, upsetting his coffee. “Damn!” Then he sopped up the spill—it had spattered some of the problem sets he’d grading earlier.

Staring at the downloaded preprint, fuming, he saw that Andy and his team had gotten really detailed data on the—on
his
—hot new object, G369.23–0.82. They must have used a lot of observing time, and gotten it pronto.

Where? His eyes ran down the usual Observations section and—
Arecibo! He got observing time there?

That took pull or else a lucky cancellation. Arecibo was the largest dish in the world, a whole scooped bowl set amid a tropical tangle, but fixed in position. You had to wait for time and then synchronize with dishes around the planet to make a map.

And good ol’ ex-classmate Andy had done it. Andy had a straightforward, no-nonsense manner to him, eased by a ready smile that got him through doors and occasionally into bedrooms. Maybe he had connections to Beth Conway at Arecibo?

No, Ralph had thought to himself,
that’s beneath me. He jumped on
G369.23–0.82
and did the obvious next step, that’s all.

Further, Andy was at Harvard, and that helped. Plenty. But it still galled. Ralph was still waiting to hear from Harkin at the Very Large Array about squeezing in some time there. Had been waiting for six weeks, yes.

And on top of it all, he then had his conference with the department chairman in five minutes. He glanced over Andy’s paper again. It was excellent work. Unfortunately.

* * * *

He sighed in the dark of Irene’s apartment, recalling the crucial hour with the department chairman. This long day wouldn’t be done until he had reviewed it, apparently.

* * * *

He had started with a fixed smile. Albert Gossian was an avuncular sort, an old fashioned chairman who wore a suit when he was doing official business. This unconscious signal did not bode well. Gossian gave him a quick, jowly smile and gestured Ralph into a seat.

“I’ve been looking at your Curriculum Vitae,” Gossian said. He always used the full Latin, while others just said “CV.” Slow shake of head. “You need to publish more, Ralph.”

“My grant funding’s kept up, I—”

“Yes, yes, very nice. The NSF is putting effort into this field, most commendable—” a quick glance up from reading his notes, over the top of his glasses—“and that’s why the department decided to hire in this area. But—can you keep the funding?”

“I’m two years in on the NSF grant, so next year’s mandatory review is the crunch.”

“I’m happy to say your teaching rating is high, and university service, but…” The drawn out vowels seemed to be delivering a message independent of the actual sentences.

All Assistant Professors had a review every two years, tracking their progress toward the Holy Grail of tenure. Ralph had followed a trajectory typical for the early century: six years to get his doctorate, a postdoc at Harvard—where Andy Lakehurst was the rising star, eclipsing him and a lot of others. Ralph got out of there after a mutually destructive affair with a biologist at Tufts, fleeing as far as he could when he saw that UC Irvine was growing fast and wanted astrophysicists. UCI had a mediocre reputation in particle theory, but Fred Reines had won a Nobel there for showing that neutrinos existed and using them to detect the spectacular 1987 supernova.

The plasma physics group was rated highest in the department and indeed they proved helpful when he arrived. They understood that 99% of the mass in the universe was roasted, electrons stripped away from the nuclei—plasma. It was a hot, rough universe. The big dramas played out there. Sure, life arose in the cool, calm planets, but the big action flared in their placid skies, telling stories that awed him.

But once at UCI, he had lost momentum. In the tightening Federal budgets, proposals didn’t get funded, so he could not add poctdocs to get some help and leverage. His carefully teased-out observations gave new insights only grudgingly. Now five years along, he was three months short of the hard wall where tenure had to happen, or became impossible: the cutoff game.

Were the groves of academe best for him, really? He liked the teaching, fell asleep in the committee meetings, found the academic cant and paperwork boring. Life’s sure erosions…

Studying fast-moving neutron stars had been fashionable a few years back, but in Gossian’s careful phrasings he heard notes of skepticism. To the Chairman fell the task of conveying the senior faculty’s sentiments.

Gossian seemed to savor the moment. “This fast-star fad—well, it is fading, some of your colleagues think.”

He bit his lip.
Don’t show anger.
“It’s not a ‘fad’—it’s a set of discoveries.”

“But where do they lead?”

“Too early to tell. We
think
they’re ejected from supernova events, but maybe that’s just the least imaginative option.”

“One of the notes here says the first ‘runaway pulsar’, called the Mouse, is now well understood. The other, recent ones will probably follow the same course.”

“Too early to tell,” Ralph persisted. “The field needs time—”

“But you do not have time.”

There was the crux of it. Ralph was falling behind in paper count. Even in the small ‘runaway pulsar’ field, he was outclassed by others with more resources, better computers, more time. California was in a perpetual budget crisis, university resources were declining, so pressure was on to Bring In the (Federal) Bucks. Ralph’s small program supported two graduate students, sure, but that was small potatoes.

“I’ll take this under advisement,” Ralph said. The utterly bland phrase did nothing to help his cause, as was clear from the chairman’s face—but it got him out of that office.

* * * *

He did not get much sleep that night. Irene had to leave early and he got a double coffee on the way into his office. Then he read Andy’s paper carefully and thought, sipping.

Few astronomers had expected to find so many runaway neutron stars.

Their likely origin began with two young, big stars, born circling one another. One went supernova, leaving a neutron star still in orbit. Later, its companion went off, too, spitting the older neutron star out, free into interstellar space.

Ralph had begun his UCI work by making painstaking maps in the microwave frequency range. This took many observing runs on the big radio antennas, getting dish time where he could around the world. In these maps he found his first candidate, G369.23–0.82. It appeared as a faint finger in maps centered on the plane of the galaxy, just a dim scratch. A tight knot with a fuzzy tail.