Timescape (30 page)

He remembered opening the bathroom door at a faculty party last year to find her seated on the toilet, her blue gown crescenting the bowl like a wreath of flowers. They had both been startled; she held a square of yellow tissue in an upraised hand. Her heels dug into the grouting between the triangular brown tiles of the floor, so her toes canted cockily into the air.

The low seat made her seem bottom-heavy. Between pale thighs he saw the unending oval yawn. A dark sheath of hose swallowed most of her legs, yielding only to the descending tongues of her garter belt. His jaw had sagged open with indecision and then he stepped in, mouth closing on the possibility of faux pas. The mirror on the far wall showed a startled stranger, puzzled. He shut the door behind him, drawn to her. "You can see this at home," she said impishly. With a studious deliberation she patted herself, unmindful of him, and let the yellow paper flutter into the mouth of water below. She half-turned on the seat, pressed the chipped ceramic handle. An answering gurgle took away her business from his prying eyes before she arose. Standing, smoothing her dress, she was taller and somehow challenging, an exotic problem. In the bleached, tile pocket she appeared luminous with purpose, a Penny he had not known. "I couldn't wait," he said with a warmth that sounded strange to himself, considering that it wasn't true. He edged by her, unzipped. The mildly pleasurable gush: release. "Getting domestic, aren't we?" Penny raised one edge of her lipsticked mouth in the lyric curve of a half-smile, seeing the mood in him. "I guess so," he said lazily. Outside, his colleagues were discussing superconductivity while their wives made shrewd observations on local real estate; the women seemed to have a better grip on what was real. Penny's smile broadened and he concluded with a quick spurt that narrowly missed the seat. He gave himself a wobbly drying shake, tucked himself in and dried the seat with more of the yellow tissues. He had never felt this simple and open with a woman before, in such a rich, enameled air. Not wanting to hang on to the moment for fear that it would burst, he kissed her lightly and popped open the door. Outside, Isaac Lakin leaned against the wall, studying the Breughel prints in the shadowed hallway and awaiting entrance to the bathroom. "Ah," he said as they emerged together. "Up to something." A simple deduction. Lakin's eyes moved from one to the other as though he could glimpse the secret, as though he had just seen a new facet of Gordon. Well, maybe he had. Maybe they both had.

"Gor-don," Penny urged him back into the present. "You've been going off like that all evening." She looked concerned. He felt a sudden spurt of irritation. The dream Penny was soft and womanly; the one before him was a nag. "If you're going to do that, why not just talk about it?"

He nodded. Her programmed night out, full of forced gaiety, had begun to wear on him. And the sudden shifts in his emotions bothered him as well. He normally thought of himself as rock-steady, unmoved by passing notions.

"Got a call from Saul today," he said stonily, fleeing his own thoughts.

"He and Frank Drake are going to get time on the big radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia. They want to study 99 Hercules."

"If they receive a signal, it will prove your case?"

"Right. It makes no sense, but–right."

"Why no sense?"

"Look, I mean–" Gordon waved a hand in exas- eeration. One of the waiters took this as a signal and began to advance. Hurriedly Gordon motioned him away. "Even if you bought the story whole, the tachyons and everything–why think there should be radio signals? Why both? The whole point of using tachyons is that radio's too slow."

"Well, at least they're doing something."

"Were you a cheerleader in high school, too?"

"God, you're a nasty bastard sometunes."

"Wrong time of the month."

"Look, Saul is trying to help."

"I don't think that's the way to solve the problem."

"What is?" When he waved away the question with a faintly disgusted look on his face, she persisted: "Really, Gordon, what is?"

"Forget it. That's the best way. Just hope everybody else will forget it, too."

"You don t really–"

"Sure I do. You should've been at that Colloqulum."

She let him cool for a moment and then tourintuit,[?]

"You were confident a week ago."

"That was a week ago."

"At least you could work on it."

"Cooper's candidacy exam is two days away. I'm going to concentrate on helping him prepare and then on getting him out. That's my job" cecl abruptly, as though having a job to do solved all issues.

"Maybe you should try something like what Saul's doing."

"No point."

"How can you be so sure?" She folded her arms, in the rattan chair and looking squarely at him. "Have you ever thought about the rigid way scientists work? It's like military training— "

"Bullshit."

"What do they teach you? Write down everything you know about a problem. Set it up in some equations. Most of the time, that's enough in itself, right? You just push the equations around a little and you've got the answer."

"Not that simple," Gordon said, shaking his head. But to himself he had to grudgingly admit that there was some truth to what she said. Assign symbols, making the x's and y's and z's the unknowns, then rearrange.

Made-to-order thinking. They were all used to it and maybe it hid some elements of the problem, if you weren't careful. Dyson, for all his wisdom, could be dead wrong, simply because of habits of mind.

"Let's have chocolate mousse," Penny said brightly.

He looked up at her. She was going to make this evening end right, one way or the other. He remembered her perched on the toilet and felt a warmth steal over him. She had been both vulnerable and serene sitting there, performing an animal function amid a gauzy gown. Pert, and oddly elegant. "Vas you-are dinner ex-see-lant, sir?"

Gordon peered at the waiter, trying to estimate if he was queer. "Ah ...

yes. Yes." He paused. "Lots better than Chef Boy-Ar-Dee."

The expression on the waiter's face was worth the price of the meal.

MAY 31, 1963

Albert Cooper's candidacy examination began well enough. Gates, a high-energy physicist, started off with a standard problem. "Mr. Cooper, consider two electrons in a one-dimensional box. Can you write down for us the wave function for this state?" Gates smiled in a friendly way, trying to defuse the tension that oral examinations always had. The student nearly always balked somewhere along the line, unable to summon up some simple piece of physics purely because of his own skittering nervousness.

Cooper worked his way through an opening piece of the problem, sketching the lowest energy state. Then he stalled. Gordon could not tell if this was simple funk or a calculated delaying tactic. Lately, sudents had hit upon the frowning, silent stall as a method for extracting hints from their committee. Often it worked. After a moment Gates said, "Well then

... should the spatial part of the wave function be symmetric?" Cooper responded eventually, "Ah ... no ... I don't think so. The spins should be ..."

and then, halting now and then, he successfully got through the rest.

Gordon felt uneasy as Gates led Cooper through a series of routine questions, all designed to find out if the candidate knew the general background of the thesis problem he proposed to attack. The air conditioning hummed with vacant energy; Cooper's chalk scratched and squeaked on the board. Gordon eyed Bernard Carroway, the astrophysicist. No trouble there. Carroway looked bored, impatient to be done with this ritual and get back to his calculations. The fourth and last member of the committee was the only problem: Isaac Lakin. As senior professor in the field of Cooper's thesis, his presence was unavoidable.

Gates finished his simple questions and Carroway, blinking sleepily, passed to Lakin. Here it comes, Gordon thought.

But Lakin was not so direct. He took Cooper through a discussion of Cooper's own experiment–usually safe ground for the student, since that was what he knew best. Lakin stressed the theoretical underpinning for the nuclear resonance effects. Cooper wrote down the scaling equations, working quickly. When Lakin probed deeper, Cooper slowed, then stopped. He tried the stalling tactic. Lakin saw through this and refused to give Cooper any meaningful hints. Carroway began to take an interest, sitting up straight for the first time during the examination. Gordon wondered why a student in difficulty always provoked more attention from a committee; was it the hunting instinct? Or a proper professorial concern that the student, presumed to be accomplished until he proved otherwise, had suddenly betrayed a fatal ignorance? Either answer was too simple, Gordon concluded.

By now Lakin had Cooper on the run. Lakin made him frame a clear picture of the theoretical model and describe the underlying assumptions.

Then Lakin cut Cooper's explanation to ribbons. His state-merits were vague, his reasoning sloppy. He had neglected two important effects.

Gordon sat absolutely still, not wanting to interrupt because he still clung to the hope that Cooper would right himself after being blown over in this quick storm, and begin to answer correctly. That hope faded. Gordon remembered Lakin relating a comment he had written on a thesis some years ago: "Young man, there is much in this work which is original and much which is correct. Unfortunately, what is correct is not original, and what is original is not correct."

Carroway joined in with a few incisive questions. Cooper seemed to make headway, then reverted back to his withdrawal mode, stalling for time. But in a two-hour examination there is more than enough time to uncover weaknesses. Carroway listened to Cooper's floundering replies, eyes still half-closed, but now obviously alert, a sour expression spreading across his face. Gates peered at Cooper as if to understand how a student who had appeared bright only moments before could now be in such trouble. When Cooper turned to answer a sally from Lakin, Gates shook his head.

Gordon decided to step in. It was not a good idea to defend your student very much in the candidacy examination precisely because it was so obvious, and it implied that you, too, conceded the student's defects.

Gordon spoke up, interrupting the flow of Carroway's probes. He pointed out that in the time remaining the committee had to consider the form and details of Cooper's experiment, and they hadn't touched on that yet.

This worked. Gates nodded. Cooper, who had been standing with his back pressed to the blackboard, smiled with evident relief. The committee room filled with the small sounds of hands riffling through papers, bodies shifting position in uncomfortable chairs: the earlier mood was broken.

Cooper could repair some of the damage.

Five minutes passed smoothly. Cooper explained his experimental setup, elaborated details of the rig. He passed around samples of his early results.

Lakin gave these papers scarcely a glance. Instead, he slipped some pages of his own into the set of data and passed them to Cooper. "My concern here, Mr. Cooper, is not only with the easy-to-understand results.

I am sure the committee will find them unsurprising. What I wish to know is whether they are correct."

"Sir?" Cooper said in a thin voice.

"We all know there are... odd... features in your work."

"Uh, I ..."

"Could you explain these things to us?"

Lakin pointed at his pages, face up on the table. They were traces showing the sudden interruption of smooth resonance curves. Gordon peered at them with a sinking feeling.

The rest of the examination seemed to go by very quickly. Cooper lost a certain calm distance he had successfully kept through the earlier questioning. He explained the spontaneous resonance effect in halting sentences. He would rush forward through an explanation he knew and, reaching the end of it, back away from its implications. He tried to edge around the question of what caused the effect. Carroway, now visibly interested, drew him back to it. Gordon's interjections did nothing to stem the flow. Gates began to second Carroway's skepticism, so that Cooper spun from Lakin to Carroway to Gates, meeting fresh objections as he turned from right to left. "This issue is at the heart of the thesis," Lakin said, and the others nodded. "It must be settled. Only Mr. Cooper knows the truth of the matter." Everyone in the room knew they were talking about the messages and Gordon and Saul Shriffer, not merely about the correctness of Cooper's electronics. But this examination was a way for the faculty to express their professional judgment of the issue, and on this ground the battle had to be fought.

Gordon let it go as long as he dared, eating into the two hours. Finally he said, "This is all very well, but are we keeping to the point? You have seen the data–"

"Of course," Lakin shot back. "But are they right?"

"I submit that this question is not what we are considering. This is a candidacy examination. We pass on the suitability of a topic–not on the final outcome."

Gates nodded. Then, to Gordon's surprise, Carroway did, too. Lakin was silent. As though the question had been settled, Gates asked Cooper an innocuous question about his setup. The examination wound down.

Carroway slumped in his chair, eyes half-closed to his own interior world, the spark gone out of him. Gordon thought wryly of what the taxpayers would think of their half-awake public servant, and then recalled that Carroway followed what were, for theoreticians, standard working hours.

He would arrive at noon, ready to substitute lunch for breakfast. Seminars and discussions with students took him into evening. By then he was ready to begin calculations–that is, real work. This early afternoon exam was, for him, a waking-up exercise.

Gordon's real work began as Cooper left the room. This was when the thesis professor listened carefully to the comments and criticisms of his colleagues, ostensibly for future use in directing the thesis research of the candidate. A subtle tug of war.

Lakin opened by doubting Cooper's understanding of the problem.