Timescape

by Gregory Benford

  Greg slipped away from the group and walked to the edge of the patio, his face clouded. Marjorie followed.

  “I had no idea things were being cut back so,” she said.

  “It’s happening everywhere.” A resigned, flat tone.

  “Well,” she said, putting a bright, cheerful lift in her voice, “we here all hope things will straighten up in a short while and the labs will reopen. The colleges are quite optimistic that—”

  “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” he said sourly. Then, glancing at her, he seemed to shake himself free of the mood. “Or, if horses were vicious, rides would go begging.” He smiled. “I love transmuted clichés, don’t you?”

  It was this sort of sudden, darting way of thinking Marjorie had come to associate with a species of scientist, the theoretical types. They were hard to understand, granted, but more interesting than the experimenters, like her John. She smiled back at him. “Surely your year here at Cambridge has taken you away from budget worries?”

  “Um. Yes, I suppose it’s better to live here in somebody else’s past, rather than your own. It’s a lovely place to forget the world outside. I’ve been enjoying the leisure of the theory class.”

  “In your ivory tower? This is a town of dreaming spires, as I think the poem goes.”

  “Oxford’s the town of dreaming spires,” he corrected her. “Cambridge is more like perspiring dreams.”

  “Scientific ambition?”

  He grimaced. “The rule of thumb is that you don’t do much first-class work past forty. That’s mostly wrong, of course. There are lots of great discoveries made late in life. But on the average, yes, you feel the ability slipping away from you. It’s like composers, I guess. Flashes out of nowhere when you’re young, and… and more a sense of consolidation, layering things on, when you’re older.”

  “This time communication thing you and John are onto certainly seems exciting. A lot of a dash there.”

  Greg brightened. “Yes, it’s a real chance again. Here’s a hot topic and nobody’s around to dig in except me. If they hadn’t closed most of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, there’d be a squad of bright young guys swarming over it.”

  Marjorie stepped further away from the rest of the party, towards the moist masses of green that regimented their garden. “I’ve been meaning to ask someone who knows,” she began with a touch of uncertainty, “just what this tachyon thing of John’s is. I mean, he explains it, but not much gets through my arts education, I’m afraid.”

  Greg clasped his hands behind him in a studied way, staring up into the sky. Marjorie noted yet another sudden shift in him; his expression became remote, as though he were peering at some persistent interior riddle. He gazed up, as if unmindful of the awkwardly stretching silence between them. Above, she saw, an airplane scratched an arc, green tail light winking, and she had a curious, uneasy feeling. Its vapor trail spread, cold silver on a sky of slate.

  “I think the hardest thing to see,” Greg said, starting as though he were composing an article in his head, “is why particles traveling faster than light should mean anything about time.”

  “Yes, that’s it. John always jumps over that, into a lot of stuff about receivers and focusing.”

  “The myopia of a man who has to actually make the damned thing work. Understandable. Well look, you remember what Einstein showed a century ago—that light was a kind of speed limit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the mindless, popular description of relativity is—” here he arched his eyebrows, as if to put visible, disdaining quotation marks about the next phrase “—that ‘everything is relative.’ Meaningless statement, of course. A better shorthand is that there are no privileged observers in the universe.”

  “Not even physicists are privileged?”

  Greg smiled at the jibe. “Especially physicists, since we know what’s going on. Point is, Einstein snowed that two people moving with respect to each other can’t agree on whether two events happen at the same time. That’s because light takes a finite time to travel from the events to the two people, and that time is different for each person. I can show you that with some simple mathematics—”

  “Oh, don’t, truly.” She laughed.

  “Agreed. This is a party, after all. Thing is, your husband has gone after some big fish here. His tachyon experiment takes Einstein’s ideas a step further, in a way. The discovery of particles traveling faster than light means those two moving observers won’t agree about which event came first, either. That is, the sense of time gets scrambled.”

  “But surely that’s merely a difficulty of communication. A problem with the tachyon beams and so on.”

  “No, dead wrong. It’s fundamental. See, the ‘light barrier,’ as it was called, kept us in a universe which had a disordered sense of what’s simultaneous. But at least we could tell which way time flowed! Now we can’t even do that.”

  “Using these particles?” Marjorie said doubtfully.

  “Yes. They rarely occur in nature, we think, so we haven’t seen the effects of them before. But now—”

  “Wouldn’t it be more exciting to build a tachyon spaceship? Go to the stars?”

  He shook his head fiercely. “Not at all. All John can make is streams of particles, not solid objects. Anyway, how do you get onto a spaceship moving by you faster than light? The idea’s nonsense. No, the real impact here is the signaling, a whole new kind of physics. And I… I’m lucky to be in on it.”

  Marjorie instinctively put her hand out and patted his arm, feeling a burst of quiet joy at this last sentence. It was good to see someone wholly involved with something beyond himself, especially these days. John was the same way, of course, but with John it was somehow different. His emotions were bottled up in an obsession with machinery and with some inner turbulence, almost a defiant anger at the universe for withholding its secrets. Perhaps that was the difference between merely thinking about experiments, as Greg did, and actually having to do them. It must be harder to believe in serene mathematical beauties when you have dirty hands.

  James approached. “Greg, have you any information on the political mood in Washington? I was wondering…”

  Marjorie saw the moment between herself and Greg was broken and she moved off, surveying the geometry of her guests. James and Greg fell to discussing politics. Greg shifted conversational gears immediately. They quickly disposed of the incessant strikes, the Trades Union Council taking most of the blame. James asked when the American government might reopen the stock market. John was hovering rather awkwardly. How odd, Marjorie thought, for a man to be so ill at ease in his own home. She sensed, from the wrinkling of his brow, that he was uncertain whether to join the two men. He knew nothing of the stock market and rather despised it as a form of gambling. She sighed and took pity on him.

  “John, come and give me a hand, will you? I’m going to put the first course on the table now.”

  He turned with relief and followed her into the house. She checked the mottled gray pâté and touched up the plates with carrot curls and lettuce from her vegetable garden. John helped her set out butter pats and Melba toast made from home-baked bread. He gingerly popped open some of her homemade wine.

  Marjorie went among the knots of conversing people, shepherding them with little bursts of bright invitation toward the dining table. She felt rather like a sheep dog, doubling back to urge on those who had snagged at a point of interest and had stopped drifting in from the garden. There were murmured comments of appreciation at the table, set with flowers from the garden and individual candles cleverly folded into the napkins. She organized them around the table, Jan next to James as they seemed to be getting on well together. Greg sat by Heather; she seemed a bit nervous about this.

  “Marjorie, you’re a marvel,” Heather declared. “This pâté is delicious—and this is home-made bread, isn’t it? However do you manage, with the power rationing and everything?”

>   “God, yes. Terrible, isn’t it?” Greg exclaimed. “I mean the power rationing,” he added quickly. “The pâté is excellent. Good bread, too. But to have electricity only four hours a day—incredible. I don’t know how you people can live with it,” and the table dissolved into “It’s an experimental measure, you understand”… “think it will last?”… “too many inequities”… “factories get power, of course”… “staggered working hours”… “ones who suffer—old codgers like us”… “the poor don’t care, do they?”… “as long as they can open a tin of beans and a pint of beer”… “the wealthy who have all the electrical gadgets who”… “that’s why it’ll be thrown straight out”… “I just do everything at the same time, laundry and vacuuming and”… “between ten and noon and the evening hours”… “Next month will be worse, when the hours change round again”… “East Anglia gets what the Midlands are getting now, twelve to two and eight to ten”—

  John put in, “How long will it be before East Anglia gets this six to eight time slot again? It’s good for dinner parties, at least.”

  “Not until November,” Marjorie answered. “Coronation month.”

  “Ah, yes,” Greg murmured. “Dancing in the dank dark.”

  “Well, they may make an exception,” Heather said, somewhat daunted by Greg’s wry tone. “How?”

  “By letting the power stay on. So people round the country can all see it.”

  “Yes,” Marjorie said, “London won’t need extra power to put it on. Come to think of it, a Coronation is quite ecological.”

  “You intend ‘ecological’ to mean ‘virtuous,’ don’t you?” Greg asked.

  “We-e-ell.” Marjorie drew out the word while she tried to judge just what Greg meant. “I know that’s a misuse of the word, but really, at a Coronation they always use horse-drawn coaches and the Abbey will be lit by candles. And they don’t need any heat there with all the peers in their furred robes.”

  “Yes, I love to see them,” Jan said. “So colorful.”

  “Quite public-minded, too, the peers.” James stated judiciously. “They’ve been very helpful to the government. Getting legislation through speedily and so on.”

  “Oh, yes.” Greg smiled. “They’ll do anything for the worker, except become one.”

  To a chorus of agreeing chuckles, Heather added, “Well, yes, anyone would rather talk than work. The peers just fill the air with their speeches.”

  “And from what I’ve seen, vice versa,” Greg responded.

  James’ face stiffened. Marjorie suddenly remembered that he had an influential relative in the House of Lords. She stood quickly and murmured something about fetching the chicken. As she left, Markham started a sentence about the American view of the opposition party and James’ thin-lipped mouth relaxed. One end of the table focused on Greg’s political stilettos and at the other James asked, “It still seems strange saying ‘the King’ after a whole lifetime of ‘the Queen,’ doesn’t it?”

  Marjorie returned with a large casserole of chicken in cream sauce with spring vegetables and a rice pilaff. Appreciative murmurs greeted the wash of steamy aroma that rose when she lifted the lid. As she served the chicken, the conversation fragmented, James and Greg talking about the labor laws, the others talking of the forthcoming Coronation. Queen Elizabeth had abdicated in favor of her eldest son the previous Christmas and he had chosen to be crowned on his fiftieth birthday, in November.

  John had gone to get more wine, a home-made hock this time.

  “I think it’s a terrible waste of money,” Heather declared. “There are so many better things we could spend the money on than a Coronation. What about cancer for instance? The statistics are horrifying. One in four, is it now?” She abruptly fell silent.

  Marjorie knew the cause, and yet it seemed pointless to smooth over it. She leaned forward. “How is your mother?”

  Heather did not hesitate to take up the topic; Marjorie realized she needed to talk about it. “Mummy’s doing fine, all things considered. I mean, she’s deteriorating, of course, but she really seems to have accepted it. She was dreadfully afraid of being doped up at the end, you know.”

  “She’s not going to be?” John asked.

  “No, the doctors say not. There is this new electronic anaesthetic thing.”

  “They simply tap into the superficial brain centers,” James added. “It blocks the perception of pain. Much less risky than chemical anaesthetics.”

  “Less addictive, too, I suppose?” Greg asked.

  Heather blinked. “I hadn’t thought of that. Could you get addicted?”

  “Maybe not, if they simply turn off the pain,” Jan said. “But what if they find a way to stimulate the pleasure centers as well?”

  “They already have,” Greg murmured.

  Really? Marjorie said. “Are they using that too?”

  “They don’t dare.” James spoke with an air of finality.

  “Well, in any case,” Heather continued, “it’s all quite beside the point for Mummy. The doctors haven’t a clue how to stop the cancer she has.”

  Before interest could center on details of the prognosis, Marjorie steered talk to other subjects.

  • • •

  When the telephone rang John answered. A reedy voice identified itself as Peterson.

  “I wanted to let you know before I packed it in for the night,” he said. “I’m in London; the Council’s European meeting just broke up. I think I’ve got what you need, or at least part of it.”

  “Tremendous,” John said rapidly. “Bloody good.”

  “I say ‘part’ because I’m not sure the Americans will send everything you need. They say there are other uses they have in mind. Uses aside from this tachyon business, I mean.”

  “Could I get a list of what they have?”

  “I’m working on it. Listen, I must ring off. Wanted to let you know.”

  “Right. Fine. And, and thanks!”

  The news changed the tenor of the party. Heather and James knew nothing of John’s experiment, so there was much explaining to do before they could understand the import of the telephone call. Renfrew and Markham took turns explaining the basic idea, skipping over the complicated matter of Lorentz transformations and how tachyons could propagate backward in time; they would have needed a blackboard to make the attempt. Marjorie came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on an apron. The men’s voices were authoritative, booming in the small dining room. Candlelight bathed the faces around the table in a pale yellow glow. The women spoke with rising inflections, questioning.

  “It seems strange to think of the people in one’s own past as real,” Marjorie said distantly. Heads turned towards her. “That is, to imagine them as, as still alive and changeable in some sense…”

  The company sat silent for a moment. Several frowned. Marjorie’s way of putting the issue had caught them off balance. They had spoken often this evening of things changing in the future. To imagine the past as alive, too, as a moving and flexing thing—

  The moment passed, and Marjorie returned to the kitchen. She came back with not one but three desserts. When she set them down, the pièce de resistance—a meringue confection with early raspberries and whipped cream—created the wave of ahs she had anticipated. She followed this in short order with pots of strawberry mousse and a large glass bowl of carefully decorated sherry trifle.

  “Marjorie, you’re too much,” James protested.

  John sat and beamed silently as the guests heaped praises on his wife. Even Jan managed two helpings, though she refused the trifle.

  “I think,” Greg commented, “that sweets must be the English substitute for sex.”

  After dessert the party moved near the fireplace as Greg and John cleared away the dessert plates. Marjorie felt a warm relaxation seeping through her as she brought in the tea things. The room had taken on a chill as darkness deepened; she added a small, glimmering candle heater to warm the cups. The fire crackled and shot an orange spark onto the
worn carpet.

  “I know coffee is supposed to be bad for you but I must say it goes better with liqueurs,” Marjorie observed. “Would anyone like some? We’ve got Drambuie, Cointreau, and Grand Marnier. Not homemade.”

  She felt a relaxed sense of accomplishment now that the meal was over. Her duties ended with handing out the cups. Outside, a wind was getting up. The curtains were open and she could see the silhouetted pine branches tossing outside the windows. The living room was an oasis of light and peace and stability.

  As if reading her thoughts, Jan quoted softly: “Stands the church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?”

  They all exaggerated, Marjorie thought, especially the press. History was a series of crises, after all, and they’d all survived so far. John worried about it, she knew, but really, things hadn’t changed all that much.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SEPTEMBER 25, 1962

  GORDON BERNSTEIN PUT DOWN HIS PENCIL WITH DELIBERATE slowness. He held it between thumb and forefinger and watched the tip tremble in the air. It was an infallible test; as he brought the pencil lead near the formica table top, the jittering of his hand made a tick-tick-tick rhythm. No matter how strongly he willed the hand to be still, the ticking continued. As he listened it seemed to swell and become louder than the muted chugging of the roughing pumps around him.

  Abruptly Gordon smashed the pencil down, gouging a black hole in the table, snapping off the lead, splintering the wood and yellow paint.

  “Hey, ah—”

  Gordon’s head jerked up. Albert Cooper was standing beside him. How long had he been there?

  “I, ah, checked with Doctor Grundkind,” Cooper said, looking away from the pencil. “Their whole rig is off the air.”

  “You looked it over yourself?” Gordon’s voice came out thin and wheezing, overcontrolled.