Timescape

by Gregory Benford

  “I believe it’s called a macho,” Peterson said wryly.

  He looked around the room. It was simple and elegant, totally white except for a few Oriental pieces. An exquisite screen stood against the far wall. To the right of the fireplace was a Japanese scroll, and a flower arrangement sat in an alcove. Opposite the fireplace, uncurtained picture windows looked over roofs and treetops towards the Pacific. The ocean was a black blanket beside lights that glittered everywhere else, up and down the coast, as far as Peterson could see. He chose a seat on a low white sofa, sitting sideways at the end of it so he could see both the room and the view. In spite of little heaps of muddled papers here and there, obviously Kiefer’s, the room exuded a certain serenity.

  “I hope this is right. Equal amounts of Pernod and tequila, is that it? I’ll go and check on the lemon juice. Oh, here’s my wife now.”

  Peterson turned toward the doorway, looked and looked again. He rose slowly to his feet. Kiefer’s wife stunned him. Japanese, young, slender, and very beautiful. Not taking his eyes from her, he tried to sort out his first disoriented impressions. In her late twenties, he decided, which explained Kiefer’s having such young children. A second marriage for him, no doubt. She was dressed in white Levis and a high-necked white top of some slithery material. Nothing under it, he noted with approval. Her hair fell smooth and straight, almost to her waist, so black it seemed to have a blue sheen. But it was her eyes that riveted his attention. Seeing her all in white in this dimly lit white room, he had the eerie sensation that her head was floating by itself. She had paused in the doorway, not deliberately for effect, Peterson thought, but her appearance was dramatic. He felt unable to move until she did. Kiefer darted nervously forward.

  “Mitsuoko, my dear, come in, come in. I want you to meet our guest, Ian Peterson. Peterson, this is my wife, Mitsuoko.” He looked eagerly from one to the other like a child bringing home a prize.

  She came forward into the room, moving with a fluid grace that delighted Peterson. She held out her hand to him: cool and smooth.

  “Hello,” she said. For once Peterson felt he could use the standard American greeting “Glad to meet you” with sincerity.

  He murmured “How do you do?” narrowing his eyes slightly to communicate what his formal greeting lacked. The merest hint of a smile lifted the corners of her lips at his unspoken message. Their gazes held fractionally longer than convention dictated. Then she withdrew her hand from his and went over to sit on the sofa.

  “Do we have any lemon juice, honey?” Kiefer was rubbing Iiis hands together again in his awkward way. “And what about you? Will you have something to drink?”

  “Yes to both questions,” she answered. “There’s some lemon juice in the fridge and I’ll have a little white wine.” She turned to Peterson with a smile. “I can’t drink much at all. It goes straight to my head.”

  Kiefer left the room in search of lemon juice.

  “How are things in England, Mr. Peterson?” she asked, tilling her head back slightly. “It sounds grim in the news here.”

  “It is bad, although a lot of people don’t yet realize how bad,” he replied. “Do you know England?”

  “I was there for a year a while back. I’m very fond of England.”

  “Oh? Were you working there?”

  “I was on a postdoc at Imperial College in London. I’m a mathematician. I teach at UCSD now.” She was smiling as she watched him, expecting a reaction of surprise. Peterson did not show it. “I can see you expected something like a philosophy degree.”

  “Oh, no, nothing so conventional,” he said smoothly, smiling back at her. He thought of philosophers as people who spent great swaths of time on questions of no more true depth than “If there is no God, then who pulls up the next Kleenex?” He was about to form this into an epigram when Kiefer came back into the room with a glass of wine and a small bottle.

  “Here’s your wine, love. And some lemon juice”—this to Peterson. “How much, just a dash?”

  “That’s splendid, thank you.”

  Kiefer sat down and turned to Peterson. “Did Mitsuoko tell you that she spent a year at London University? She’s a brilliant woman, my wife. Ph.D. at twenty-five. Brilliant and beautiful too. I’m a lucky man.” He beamed proudly at her.

  “Alex, don’t do that.” The words were sharp but her affectionate smile took the edge off them. She shrugged deprecatingly towards Peterson. “It’s embarrassing. Alex is always boasting about me to his friends.”

  “I can understand why.” Behind Peterson’s blandly smiling exterior he calculated. He had only one evening. Did they have an open marriage? How direct an approach would she tolerate? How to broach the subject with Kiefer there? “Your husband tells me that things are pretty bad here too, although it doesn’t look that way to a visitor.”

  What did her smile mean? It was almost as though they shared a secret. Was she in fact reading his thoughts? Was she merely flirting? Or could it be—the thought flashed upon him—that she was nervous? She was certainly sending him signals.

  “There’s a psychological inability to give up luxury standards,” Kiefer was saying. “People won’t give up a life style that they think is, ah, uniquely American.”

  “Is that a current catch phrase?” Peterson asked. “I saw it used in a couple of magazines I read on the plane.”

  Kiefer gave this hypothesis his best concerned frown. “Um, ‘uniquely American’? Yeah, I suppose it is. Saw an editorial about something like that this week. Oh, say, excuse me, I’ll go check the boys.”

  Kiefer left the room in his eager-terrier style. In a moment Peterson could hear him talking mildly but firmly to the boys somewhere down the hall. They regularly interrupted him with tenor bright-boy-aware-that-he-is-being-bright backtalk. Peterson took a pull on his drink and reflected on the wisdom of proceeding further with Mitsuoko. Kiefer was a link in Peterson’s information-gathering chain, the most essential part of an executive’s working machinery. This was indeed California, notorious California, and the date was well advanced beyond the nineteenth century, but one could never be sure how a husband would react to these things, never mind what they said in theory about the whole matter. But beyond such calculations was the fact that the man irritated him with his fanaticism about health foods and nonsmoking and undignified devotion to those decidedly unpleasant children.

  Well, executives were supposed to be able to make quick, incisive decisions, correct? Correct.

  He turned to Mitsuoko, seeking the best way to use these moments alone. She was staring out at the view, which she must have memorized ages ago.

  Before he could formulate an opening she asked, not looking at him, “Where are you staying, Mr. Peterson?”

  “La Valencia. And the name is Ian.”

  “Ah, yes. There’s a nice strip of beach there, south of the cove. I often take a walk there in the evenings.” She looked directly at him. “About ten o’clock.”

  “I see,” Peterson replied. He felt a pulse beating in his neck. It was the only outward sign of excitement. By God, she had done it. She had made an assignation with him almost under her husband’s nose. Christ, what a woman.

  Kiefer came back into the room. “There’s a growing crisis here,” he said.

  Petersen gave a snort of laughter which he deftly turned into a cough.

  “I think you’re right,” he managed drily. He dared not look at Mitsuoko.

  • • •

  On the long flight over the pole Peterson had time to browse through the file from Caltech. He felt relaxed and pleasantly dissipated, with the slack sensation one gets when he knows he has done quite as much as could be expected along the lines of self-indulgence. No regrets, that was the ticket; it meant one had passed up nothing. To reach the grave with that assurance would surely be at least comforting.

  Mitsuoko had rather lived up to the subliminal advanced billing. She had cleared off after three hours, presumably with some solid story, or better, a t
acit agreement of no questions from Kiefer. A suitable topping off for a wearing trip.

  The Caltech file was something else. There were some grimly detailed internal reports, all a tangle of words and mathematical symbols to him. Markham could frolic in it, if he liked. There were signs that the file hadn’t been freely given over. A Xerox of an official letter, Peterson-inspired, backgrounding for the Council, had scrawled at the bottom Stall them—let’s not get scooped. Surely the author of the note would have lifted that out before making it semipublic. The explanation was obvious. The American government had quite effective internal security people. Rather than trade letters with Caltech, they’d clandestinely photographed whatever they could turn up. Peterson sighed. A dicey method, but then again, not his problem.

  The only intelligible portion of the file was a personal letter, presumably stuck in, because of key words.

  Dear Jeff,

  I’m not going to make it down for Easter; there’s just too much to do here at Caltech. The last few weeks have been extremely exciting. I’m working with a couple of other people and we really don’t want to break off our calculations, even for a holiday in Baja. I’m really sorry about it as I was looking forward to getting together with you both again (if you take my meaning!). I shall miss the prickly cactus and the delicious dry heat, too. Sorry, and maybe next time. Tell Linda I’ll call her for a chat in the next few days if I can find time. Any chance of you people coming up here for a day (or better yet, a night)?

  After breaking a promise like this I suppose I ought to tell you what’s stirred me up so. Probably a marine biologist like you won’t think this is of such great concern—cosmology doesn’t count for a lot in the world of enzymes and titrated solutions and all that, I suppose—but to those of us working in the gravitational theory group it looks as though there’s a genuine revolution around the corner. Or maybe it’s already arrived.

  It’s related to a problem that’s been hanging around astrophysics for a long time. If there is a certain quantity of matter in the universe, then it has a closed geometry—which means it will eventually stop expanding and begin to contract, pulled back together by gravitational attraction. So people in our line of work have been wondering for some time if there is enough matter in our universe to close off the geometry. So fan direct measurements of the matter in our universe have been inconclusive.

  Just counting the luminous stars in the universe gives a small quantity of matter, not enough to close off space-time. But there’s undoubtedly a lot of unseen mass such as dust, dead stars, and black holes.

  We’re pretty sure that most galaxies have large black holes at their centers. That accounts for enough missing matter to close off our universe. What’s new is the recent data on how distant galaxies are bunched up together. These galactic-scale clumps mean there are large fluctuations in matter density throughout our universe. If galaxies bunch up together somewhere in our universe, and their density gets high enough, their local space-time geometry could wrap around on itself, in the same way that our universe might be closed.

  We now have enough evidence to believe Tommy Gold’s old idea—that there are parts of our universe which have enough clustered galaxies to form their own closed geometry. They won’t look like much to us—just small areas with weak red light coming out of them. The red is from matter still falling into those clumps. The shocker here is that these local density fluctuations qualify as independent universes. The time for forming a separate universe is independent of the size. It goes like the square root of Gn, where G is the gravitational constant and n the density of the contracting region. So it’s independent of the size of the miniuniverse. A small universe will close itself off just as fast as a large one. This means all the various-sized universes have been around for the same amount of “time.” (Defining just what time is in this problem will drive you to drink, if you’re not a mathematician—maybe if you are, too.)

  The point here is that there may be closed-off universes inside our own. In fact, it would be a remarkable coincidence if our universe was the largest of all. We may be a local lump inside somebody else’s universe. Remember the old cartoon of a little fish being swallowed by a slightly larger one, in turn about to be swallowed by another bigger one, and so on, ad infinitum? Well, we may be one of those fishes.

  The last few weeks I’ve been working on the problem of getting information about—or out of—these universes inside our own. Clearly, light can’t get out of one universe into the next. Neither can matter. That’s what a closed geometry means. The only possibility might be some type of particle that doesn’t fit into the constraints set by Einstein’s theory. There are several candidates like this, but Thorne (the grand old man around here) doesn’t want to get into that morass. Too messy, he says.

  I think tachyons are the answer. They can escape from smaller “universes” inside our own. So the recent discovery of tachyons has enormous implications for cosmology. It’s hard to detect tachyons, so we don’t know much about them. They give, us a direct link to the sealed-off space-times inside our universe, though, which is why I’m working so hard on the problem. There’s a chance of a first-class discovery in this. We’ve had the devil of a time pursuing things, with the food strike and the big fire in LA. Probably nobody will give much of a damn, with the world in its present state. But that’s what the academic life is for.

  I’m sorry I’ve gone on about this at such length and probably made no sense, but the whole thing is tremendously exciting to me and I tend to get carried away. Anyway, I’m sorry about Baja. Hope to see you both soon. Love, Cathy

  Peterson felt a momentary twinge of guilt at reading a private letter. The Council used such methods routinely now, of course, to get quickly round the recalcitrant interests who had not accepted the necessity for quick action. Still, he was a gentleman and a gentleman does not read another’s mail. His reluctance soon, submerged beneath his interest in the implications of what was said by “Cathy.” Subuni-verses? Incredible. The landscape of the scientist was ultimately unreal.

  Peterson leaned back in his seat and studied Canadian wastes slipping by below. Yes, perhaps that was it. For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable? Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DECEMBER 3, 1962

  COOPER LAID THE RED-GRIDDED SHEETS OUT IN A long line across the lab countertop. He stood back, balancing on his toes like a sprinter preparing to go the distance, and surveyed his work. The subdued hum of the laboratory underlined the expectation in the air. “That’s it,” Cooper said slowly. “They’re in the right order.”

  “That’s our best data?” Gordon murmured.

  “Best I’ll ever get,” Cooper said, frowning at something in Gordon’s voice. He turned, hands on hips. “It’s all consecutive, too. Three hours worth.”

  “It looks good and clean,” Gordon said in a conciliatory tone. “Sharp.”

  “Yeah,” Cooper admitted. “Nothing funny about this. If there was a clear resonance there, I’d see it.”

  Gordon traced his finger along the green data lines. There were no standard resonances at all. Inside their sample, cooled down to 3 degrees absolute in the bubbling helium, were atomic nuclei. Each was a tiny magnet. They tended to line up along the magnetic field Cooper had applied to the sample. The standard experiment was simple: apply a brief electromagnetic pulse, which tipped the nuclear magnets away from the magnetic field. In time, the nuclei would line up with the field again. This nuclear relaxation process could tell the experimenter much about the environment inside the solid. It was a relatively simple way to learn about microscopic features of the complex solid structure. Gordon liked the work for its clarity and directness, aside from any applications to transistors or infrared detectors it might eventually have. This branch of solid state physics didn’t have the high visi
bility of things like quasars or high-energy particle research but it was clean and had a kind of simple beauty.

  The jagged traces before him, though, were neither simple nor beautiful. Here and there were fragments of what they should be getting: nuclear resonance curves, smooth and meaningful. But in most of the gridded traces there were sudden jagged line bursts of electromagnetic noise, appearing abruptly for an instant, then disappearing just as suddenly.

  “The same spacings,” Gordon murmured.

  “Yeah,” Cooper said. “The one-centimeter ones—” he pointed “—and the shorter ones, half a centimeter. Regular as hell.”

  Both men looked at each other, then back at the data. Each had hoped for a different result. They had done these experiments over again and again, eliminating all possible sources of noise. The ragged bursts would not vanish.

  “It’s a goddam message,” Cooper said. “Must be.”

  Gordon nodded, fatigue seeping through him. “There’s no avoiding it,” he said. “We’ve got hours of signal here. Can’t be coincidence, not this much.”

  “No.”

  “Okay then,” Gordon said, summoning up optimism in his voice. “Let’s decode the fucking thing.”

  • • •

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