Timescape (38 page)

He smiled and made little jokes and felt a little eerie, living in his student persona again, but somehow it all came together and worked. Claudia Zinnes slipped from "maybe" and "if" to "when" and then, seemingly without noticing the transition, she was scheduling some time on the NMR rig in September and October. She asked after some of his classmates, where they were, what sort of jobs. He saw suddenly that she had a true affection for the young people who passed through her hands and out into the world. As she left she patted his arm, brushed some lint from his damp summer jacket.

As he walked away across South Field he remembered the undergraduate awe that ran through him in those first four long, hard years. Columbia was impressive. Its faculty was world famous, the buildings and laboratories imposing. Never had he suspected that the place might be a mill grinding out intelligent trolls willing and able to wire the circuits, draw the diagrams, to spin the humming wheels of industry.

Never had he thought that institutions could stand or fall because of the vagaries of a few individuals, a few uninspected biases. Never. Religions do not teach doubt.

He took a taxi crosstown. The cab banged into potholes on some of the side streets, a jarring contrast with California's smooth boulevards. He was just as glad Penny had refused to come; the city wasn't at its best on the grill of August. They had been tense with each other since the marriage thing came up. Maybe a short separation would help. Let the whole subject drift downstream into the past. Gordon watched the blur of faces going by outside. There was an earthen hum here, like the sound the IRT made going under Broadway. The hollow, heavy rumble seemed to him strangely threatening with its casual reminder of other people going about their other lives, totally ignorant of nuclear nagnetic resonance and enigmatic sun-tanned Californians. His obsessions were merely his, not universal. And he realized that every time he tried to focus on Penny his mind skittered away into the safe recesses of the spontaneous resonance muddle. So much for being captain of his fate. He got out of the cab into the street where he grew up, blinking in the watery sunlight. Same beat-up trash cans adding their perfume, same grillwork, same Grundweiss grocery down the corner. Dark-eyed young housewives toting bags, herding their chattering children. The women were conservatively dressed, the only hint of undercurrents being their broad, lipsticked, sensuous mouths. Men in gray business suits hurrying by, black hair cropped short. His mother was on the landing, arms spread wide, as he came up. He gave her a good-son kiss. When he came into the old living room with its funny, close flavors–"it's in the furniture, the stuffing, it's with us for life," she said, as though the stuffing was immortal–it washed over him. He decided to just let everything go. Let her tell him the months of carefully stored gossip, show the engagement pictures of distant relatives, cook him "a good home meal, for once"–chopped liver, and kugel and fianken. They listened to calypso rhythms on the ancient brown Motorola in the corner. Later they went down to see the Grundweisses.

"He tells me three times, bring that boy down. I'll give him an apple like before"– and around the block, hailling friends, discussing seriously the statistics of earthquakes, heaving a softball into the waning summer light for a bunch of kids playing in a lot. The next day, just from that one throw–"Can you believe it?"–his arm was sore.

He stayed two days. His sister came over, cheerful and busy and oddly calm. Her dark eyebrows moved with each arch of a sentence, each surge of her face, making dancing parentheses. Friends dropped by. Gordon went all the way over to 70th Street to get some California wine for these occasions, but he was the only one who drank more than a glass. Still, they talked and joked with as much animation as any La Jolla cocktail party, proving alcohol an unnecessary lubricant.

Except his mother. She ran out of neighborhood news soon enough and then relied on his friends or his sister to carry the conversation. Alone with him, she said little. He found himself slowly drawn into this vacuum.

The apartment had been thick with talk as he grew up, except in the last times of his father, and a silence here unnerved him. Gordon told his mother about the battle over his work. Of Saul Shriffer. (No, she had not seen the TV news, but she heard. She wrote him, remember?) Of spontaneous resonance. Of Tulare's warning. And finally, of Penny. His mother didn't, wouldn't, couldn't believe a girl would turn down a man like her son. What could she be thinking of, to do that? Gordon found this response unexpectedly pleasing; he had forgotten the ability of mothers to shore up sons' egos. He confessed to her that somehow he had gotten into the habit of thinking he and Penny would settle into something more conventional ("respectable," his mother corrected). It had come as a surprise that Penny wasn't thinking in parallel. Something had happened to him then. He tried to explain it to his mother. She made the familiar, encouraging sounds. "Maybe, I don't know, it was Penny I wanted to hold on to, now that everything else is going kaput ..." But that wasn't quite what he meant, either. He knew the words were false as soon as they were out. His mother picked up on them, though. "So she doesn't know what's what, this is a surprise? I tried to tell you that." Gordon shook his head, sipping tea, confused. It was no use, he saw. H was all jumbled up inside and he suddenly didn't want to talk about Penny any more. He started on the physics again and his mother clattered the spoons and teapot with fresh energy, smiling, "Good work, yes, that's good for you now. Show her what she's lost by-" and on she went, longer than Gordon wanted. He felt a momentum building in him, an urgency. He veered from these muddy matters of women. As his mother's voice droned in the heavy air he thought about Claudia Zinnes. He shuffled numbers and equipment in his head. He was making some plans when her phrases gradually penetrated: she thought he was leaving Penny. "Huh?" he sputtered, and she said blankly, 'Well, after that girl rejected you–" An argument followed. It reminded him far too much of the debates over when he had to be home from dates, and what he wore, and all the other small things that finally drove him to an apartment of his own. It ended with the same sad shaking of the head, the "You are fartootst, Gordon, fartootst..."

He changed the subject, wanted to call up Uncle Herb. "He is in Massachusetts. He bought a consignment of hats cheap, now he's up there to spread them around. The market fell poosh when Kennedy wouldn't wear one, you know, but your uncle figures in New England the men, their heads are cold." She made more tea, they went for a walk. The silences widened between them. Gordon made no attempt to bridge them. His mother was aboil over Penny, he could see that, but he'd had enough. He could stay longer, but the spreading silences promised more trouble. He stayed overnight, took her to an off-Broadway play and topped it off with crepes at Henry VIII's. The next morning he caught the 8:28 United for the coast.

AUGUST 12, 1963

Cooper looked doubtful. "You think this is enough?"

"For now, yeah. Who knows?"–Gordon shrugged–"Maybe for good, too."

"I at least ought to fill in some of the high field observations."

"Not that important."

"After what that committee did to me, I want to be sure— "

"More data isn't the answer. You need more background reading, more analysis of your data, things like that. Not more numbers churning out of the lab."

"You sure?"

"You can close out your run by tomorrow."

"Umm. Well, okay."

In reality, Cooper probably could strengthen his case with more data.

Gordon had always disliked the practice of overmeasuring every effect, though, mostly because he suspected it deadened the imagination. After while you saw only what you expected to see. How could he be sure Cooper was really taking all the data as it came?

This was a justifiable reason for bumping Cooper off the NMR rig, but that wasn't why Gordon did it.

Claudia Zinnes would be starting up in September. If she found anything anomalous, Gordon wanted to be running simultaneously.

Gordon came home from the lab hungry. Penny had already eaten and was watching the 11 o'clock news. "Want anything?" he called from the kitchen.

"No."

"What's that you're watching?"

"March on Washington."

"Uh?"

"Martin Luther King. You know."

He hadn't been paying any attention to the news.

He asked nothing more; discussing politics with Penny would only set her off. She had been elaborately casual since he had returned. There was an odd truce between them, not a peace.

"Hey," he called, coming into the living room, which was lit only by the pale electric glow of the TV. "Dishwasher won't go on."

"Uh huh." She didn't turn her head.

"Did you call?"

"No. You, for once."

"I did last."

"Well,
I'm
not. Hate that. Let it be broke."

"You spend more time with it than me."

"That'll change, too."

"What?"

"Not busting ass to fix meals any more."

"Didn't think you had."

"How'd you know. You couldn't fry butter."

"Two points off for credibility," he said lightly. "You know I can cook some things, anyway."

"Come on."

"I'm serious," he said sharply. "I'm going to be in the lab a lot and–"

"Loud and prolonged applause."

"For Chrissake."

"I won't be here much, so."

"Neither will I except in and out."

"Least you're doing something now."

"Crap, that's not what you're on the rag about."

"Metaphorical rag?"

"Real rag, metawhatever rag–how do I know?"

"I thought you thought maybe real rag. Otherwise maybe you would've touched me since you got back."

"Oh."

"Didn't notice, huh?"

Grimly: "I noticed."

"Okay, why?"

"Wasn't thinking about it, I guess."

"Think about it."

"You know, busy."

"Think I don't know? Come on, Gordon. I saw your face when you got off that plane, We were going to have a drink at the El Cortez, look at the city.

Lunch."

"Okay. Look, I need dinner."

"You dinner, I'll watch the speech."

"Good. Wine?"

"Sure. Enough for later?"

"Later?"

"My mother should've taught me to be more direct. Later, when we fuck."

"Oh, yes. Fuck we will."

They did. It wasn't very good.

Gordon broke Cooper's experiment down to the basic components.

Then he rebuilt it. He checked each piece for shielding, looking for any way an unsuspected signal could get into the circuitry. He had most of it reassembled when Saul Shriffer appeared, unannounced in the lab.

"Gordon! I was just at UCLA and thought I'd drop by."

"Oh, hi," Gordon murmured, wiping his hands on an oily cloth. A man with a camera followed Saul into the lab.

"This is Alex Paturskl, from
Life
. They're doing a piece on exobiology."

"I'd appreciate a few shots," Paturski said. Gordon murmured yeah, sure, and Paturski quickly brought in reflecting screens and camera gear.

Saul talked about the reaction to his announcement. "Dreadful example of closed minds," Saul said. "Nobody is following up our lead. I can't get anyone in the astronomical community to give the idea five seconds."

Gordon concurred, and decided not to tell Saul about Claudia Zinnes.

Paturski circled them, clicking and bobbing. "Turn this way a little more, eh?" and Saul would do as directed. Gordon followed suit, wishing he wore something more than a T-shirt and jeans. This was, of course, the one day he had not worn his usual slacks and Oxford broadcloth.

"Great, gentlemen, just great," Paturski said in conclusion. Saul inspected the experiment a moment. Gordon showed him some preliminary warmup traces he'd taken. Sensitivity was low but the curves were obviously clean resonance lines.

"Too bad. More results could open this whole thing up again, you know." Saul studied him. "Let me know if you see anything, okay?"

"Don't hold your breath."

"No, I suppose not." Saul appeared momentarily dejected. "I really thought there was something to it, too."

"Maybe there is."

"Yes. Yes, of course, perhaps there is." He brightened.

"Don't get the idea that it's all over, eh? When it's died out a little, and people have stopped hooting with laughter at the very idea–well, it'll make a good article. Maybe. something for
Science
titled 'Tilting at Orthodox Windmills.' That might go over."

"Well, Alex and I have to be off. We're going up through Escondido to Palomar."

"Doing some observing there?" Gordon asked casually.

"No. No, I don't do the observations, you know. I'm more an idea man.

Alex wants to take some pictures, that's all. It's an awesome place."

"Oh yes."

In a moment they were gone and he could get back to his experiment.

The first day Gordon got the NMR rig back on the air there were signal-to-noise problems. On the second day stray leakage waves clouded the results. One of the indium antimonide samples acted funny and he had to cycle the rig down, dump the cold bath and pull the defective sample.

That took hours. Only on the third day did the resonance curves begin to look right. They were reassuringly accurate. They fit theory quite well, within the crossbars of experimental error. Beautiful, Gordon thought.

Beautiful and dull. He kept the rig running all day, in part to be sure the electronics stayed stable. He found he could take care of ordinary business–coaching Cooper; making up lecture notes for the coming semester; cutting the tiny gray indium antimonide bars on the hot-wire, oil-immersion setup–and duck into the lab for a quick NMR measurement every hour or two. He settled into a routine. Things got done. The curves remained normal.

"Professor Bernstein?" the woman said, her voice pitched high and grating. He wondered idly if her accent was midwestern. "Yes," he said into the telephone.