Timescape (46 page)

"To tell you the truth, I'm just a bit squiffy. I was nervous here on my own and I had a couple of drinks. I'm afraid they go to my head rather."

"Well, that's probably the best way to be. May I get myself a drink and catch up a bit."

"Please do. Can you help yourself? I hardly even know what we've got.

I'm drinking Pernod."

She watched him cross the room. While his back was turned, she felt free to stare at him. He squatted lightly before the sideboard, tilting the bottles to read their labels. She leaned her head in her hand. She was aware of him coming back across the room, stopping by her, crouching...

"Are you sure you're all right, Marjorie?"

She could not meet his eyes. She knew she was blushing. His hand rested on the arm of her chair.

She looked at his gold watch, the slender wrist, the dark hair on the back of his pale hand. She felt unable to move. She stared at the hand.

"Marjorie?"

"I'm sorry. I feel terribly hot, Ian."

"Let me open a window. It's very stuffy in here."

The hand disappeared from view and presently she felt air cooling her damp forehead.

"Oh, that's better. Thank you."

She leaned back, was able to look at him. After all, he was not so very special. Goodlooking, but not strikingly so. She smiled back at him.

"I'm sorry. I'm a bit weird this evening. There's been this cloud thing, and then Greg Markham, and ... well, things can seem pointless. And yet one is... glad to be alive ... I'm Sorry. I'm not making much sense, am I?

It's just that we're so powerless. I keep wanting to do something."

"You're making a lot of sense, Marjorie." Thunder crashed suddenly, shaking the house.

"Christ, that was close!" she exclaimed, and then was taken aback at herself. She mustn't be so excitable. A prickly wave rushed over her skin. "I wonder if more of those cloud organisms are coming down in this rain."

"Probably."

"There was a local woman, I heard, who kept a home for cats. She gave all her own tinned food to the cats, thinking the boxed food she had for them had been contaminated. I expect she'll starve."

"Mad." He took a substantial pull on his drink.

"Did you hear about the Coronation? They've canceled preparations."

Peterson said sarcastically, "Why, I expect the country will be in an uproar over that."

Marjorie smiled. A flash, then a booming crash of thunder. Marjorie leaped up in fright. They looked at each other and abruptly burst out laughing.

"As long as you can hear it, you're safe," he said. "By that time the lightning's passed."

Suddenly she felt very good. She was glad to have him there, keeping loneliness and fear at bay.

"Are you hungry? Would you like something to eat?"

"No, I'm not. Relax. Don't play the hostess. If I want anything, I'll get it."

He smiled wanly at her. Was there a double entendre in his words? He must be used to getting anything he wanted. Tonight, though, he was less certain, more... "It's good to see you," she said. "It's been pretty lonely here recently with the children away and John working late."

"Yes, I imagine..." He didn't finish the sentence. The lights went out, dramatically accompanied by a roll of thunder.

"Now I'm really glad you're here. I'd be scared stiff on my own, thinking someone had cut the lines to the house or something."

"Oh, I'm sure it's just a power failure. Lines blown down by the wind, probably."

"That's been happening a lot recently. I've got some candles in the kitchen."

She crossed the room, skirting the furniture in the dark from long familiarity. In the kitchen she felt in the cupboard for candles and matches. Automatically she lit three and set them in candlesticks. The mechanical clock on a shelf went tick, followed by a clacking as gears moved. She turned and found Ian in the doorway. He stepped inside. The clock made a sound like a rachet sticking. "Oh, I fetched that out of the garage, whilst straightening up," she said. "With the power always off, an old windup is better ..." Tick. "Makes that odd sound, though, doesn't it?"

"Perhaps if you oiled it ..."

"But I did, you see. There's something needs..." Shelving loomed up in the shadows cast by the candles. Things in the room waved and rippled, except for the straight shelves. Tick.

"Interesting," Ian murmured, "how we keep on wanting to know the time, in the midst of all that's going on."

"Yes."

"As if we still had appointments to keep."

"Yes."

A silence stretched between them, a chasm. She searched for something to say. Tick. The shelves seemed more substantial now than the walls. The clock nested in the middle of them, surrounded by preserves.

She looked at Ian. In this dim light his eyes were very dark. She leaned against the cupboard, less nervous now. She should take the candles into the living room, but for the moment it felt right to stay here, not hurry.

Ian moved across the small kitchen. Distantly she wondered if he was going to take a candle. Tick. He reached up and touched her cheek.

Neither of them moved. She felt warm. She took a shallow breath. She breathed in and it seemed to take a long time to fill her lungs.

Very slowly he bent and kissed her. It was a light, almost casual touch.

She sagged against the cupboard. Tick. She breathed out. In the silence she wondered if he could hear the air flowing in and out of her. She watched as he picked up a candle. A hand touched her shoulder. He steered her out, away from the kitchen and shelves and clock, toward the living room.

OCTOBER 12, 1963

Penny's voice cut through to him: "As I was saying."

"Huh? Oh, yes, go on."

"Come on, you weren't listening at all." She swerved the rented Thunderbird around a curve. The Bay Area lay below and to the right, the twinkling of the bay hazed by fog. "Absent-minded prof."

"Okay, okay." But he slipped back into a fog of his own as she zoomed them around Grizzly Peak's hairpin turns above the Berkeley campus and then onto Skyline. He glimpsed Oakland's sprawl, green dots of islands in the blue-gray bay, and San Francisco in alabaster isolation. They flitted behind stands of pine and eucalyptus, the trees making black and green grids against the brown of the hillsides. Penny had the top down. Cool air made her hair stream and float behind her head. "Mount Tamalfuji!" she called, pointing at a short, blunted peak to the north across the bay. Then they were into the descent, brakes squealing and gears growling as she took them down Broadway Terrace. A forest musk enveloped them. They emerged from the tree-thick hillside and shot past a jumble of houses, a technicolor spattering. Traffic thinned as they neared her parents' house.

Clearly, a ritzy section with an appropriately posh name: Piedmont.

Gordon thought of Long Island and Gatsby and yellow sedans.

Her parents proved unmemorable. Gordon could not be sure whether this was due to them or to him. His mind kept drifting back to the experiment and the messages, rummaging for some fresh tool to pry up the lid of the mystery. Come at it from a different angle, Penny had said once. He couldn't get the phrase out of his mind. He found he could carry on conversation and smile and do the dance of guest and host, without ever really taking part in what was going on. Penny's father was big and reassuringly gruff, a man who knew how to turn money into more money.

He had the standard graying temples and a certain sun-baked assurance.

Her mother seemed serene, a joiner of clubs and charities, a scrupulous housekeeper. Gordon felt he had met them before but couldn't place them, like characters in a movie whose title won't spring to the lips.

The invitation had been to stay over at the house. Gordon insisted on their staying in a motel on University Avenue–to put them smack in the middle of town, he said, but in fact because he wanted to avoid the touchy question of whether they would share a room in her parents' castle. He wasn't ready for that issue, not this weekend.

Her father had heard about the Saul thing, of course, and wanted to talk about it. Gordon told him just enough to be polite and then deflected talk to the department, UCLJ, and gradually to topics further and further away. Her father–"Jack," he said with a warm, forthright handshake, "just call me plain Jack"–had bought some introductory astronomy books to learn more. This proved to be a handy time-filler, as Gordon sat back and let Jack regale him with facts about the stars, and the obligatory reverent awe at the scope of the universe. Jack had a sharp, inquiring mind. He asked penetrating questions. Gordon soon found his own rather elementary knowledge of astronomy was stretched thin. While the women cooked and chattered in the kitchen, Gordon struggled to explain the carbon cycle, supernova explosions, and the riddles of globular clusters.

He summoned up smatterings of half-remembered lectures. Jack caught him in a few boners and Gordon began to feel uncomfortable. He thought of Cooper's exam.

At last they had a beer before lunch and Jack switched to other subjects. Linus Pauling had just won the Nobel Peace Prize: what did Gordon think of that? Wasn't this the first time anybody had won two Nobels? No, Gordon pointed out, Madame Curie had won one in physics and another in chemistry. Gordon was afraid this would launch them into politics. He was pretty sure Jack was a member of the disarmament-equals-unich[?] school, pushed locally by Willian Knowland of the
Oakland Trib
. But Jack adroitly side-stepped the point and ushered them into a steaming lunch of soup and well-marbled minute steaks.

Jacaranda trees cloaked a portion of the view from the dining room. The rest of the windows gave a sweeping vista of bay and city and hills. The steak was perfect.

"See?" Penny called. "Ajax knows what you're going to do before you know yourself."

Gordon watched. The big horse shivered, snorted, blinked. She took Ajax from a standing position directly into a canter. Ajax bounded forward, puffing, ears pricked. She could get the animal to turn from either foot instantly, and make him walk sideways using only the pressure of her leg. She moved Ajax subtly, coasting around the corral.

Gordon slumped against the railings. Come at it from a different angle.

Okay, Ramsey had the biochem part wrapped up. But that was a piece, not the whole puzzle. The only other hard data they had was good old RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2, a drum beat that led nowhere. It had to mean something–

"Gordon! I'm taking Ajax out on a trail ride. Want to come?"

"Uh, okay. No riding, though."

"Come on."

He shook his head, distracted. All he could remember now from the previous hour of her instruction was how to avoid getting kicked. When you walked behind him you had to keep close to the rump, so the horse knew there wasn't room to get in a good healthy whack with his hoof.

Brushing the tail apparently told the animal you were not a suitable target to relieve its minor irritations on, and it lost interest. This seemed doubtful to Gordon. It was an animal, after all, incapable of such foresight.

He hiked along the ridge line above her. RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2. They were just below the lip of the Oakland hills. The rumpled brown landscape of Contra Costa County lay in the distance. The redwoods and pines around him were musty with a dry, swarming odor he could not place.

263 KEV PEAK. POINT SOURCE IN TACHYON SPECTRUM.

A fine dust rose in puffs to greet his steps. It was late afternoon. Blue shadows lanced through the dusty clouds behind Ajax. Penny had come here every day when she was in high school, Jack told him. Gordon had considered making a wry joke about the Freudian implications of adolescent girls and horseback riding. He decided against it after a glance at Penny.

CAN VERIFY WITH NMR.

This horsy ambience was far away from the sandlot ball he remembered as his only sport. Clop clop of hooves, images of Gary Cooper or maybe Ida Lupino, a stately glide through aisles of looming redwoods: serene. Gordon felt heavy and conspicuous. He plodded through the woods in black street shoes his mother had bought in Macy's, unsuited for this distant continent. He felt surrounded here by a naturalness he found foreign.

RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2, RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2.

Yeah, verily.

That night, when he made love to her back at the motel, Penny seemed changed. Her hips had got harder. Angular patterns of bone spoke to him through the thin cloak of flesh. She was tough, western, a horsewoman.

She knew that artichokes grew on a sort of bush, not on trees. She could cook over an open fire. He found her breasts more pointed, with pronounced nipples, rosy and soft, that puck-ered swiftly as he sucked on them. The east was east and the rest was west.

Jack took them out Sunday in late morning to watch some walnutting he had invested in. In the walnut groves near Alamo a mechanical tree-shaker chuffed and wheezed. Its hydraulic arm yanked at the tree trunks, bringing showers of nuts bursting from the sky. Men shepherded a contraption down the lanes between the trees, coaxing its engine. It flicked rubber flippers to the side, herding the nuts into ragged rows. A picker followed after. The walnuts were still in their dappled green husks and the picker scooped them up, leaving behind the twigs and dirt and snapped branches. Jack explained that this new method would pay off in no time. A trailer carried the nuts to a gauntlet of brushes and wire nets, where the hulls were rubbed off. A natural gas oven baked off any hulls that stuck. "Going to revolutionize the industry," Jack pronounced.

Gordon watched the huffing machines and the gangs of men tending them. They worked even on Sunday; it was harvest. The walnut groves were soothing after the bleak scrub desert of Southern California. The long shadowed ranks of green reminded him of upper New York State. The clanking arm that strangled trees for their nuts was disturbing, though: a new, robot west.

"Can I borrow some of those astronomy books of yours this afternoon?"

he asked Jack abruptly.

Jack nodded, surprised, covering it with a baffled grin. Penny rolled her eyes and grimaced: Won't you ever stop working, even for a weekend?