“Okay, look, I really can’t get away now. But soon. Yes, soon I’ll come.”
“Gordon, I think now.”
“No, look, Uncle Herb, I know how you feel. And I will come. Soon.”
“Soon means when?”
“I’ll call you. Let you know as soon as I can.”
“All right then. Soon. She hasn’t heard from you much lately.”
“Right, I know. Soon. Soon.”
• • •
He called his mother, to explain. Her voice was thin and reedy, shrunken by the miles. She seemed in good spirits, though. The doctors were very nice, they treated you with consideration. No, she had no problem with the hospital bills, he was not to worry about that. She played down the idea that he should come see her. He was a professor, he had students, and why spend all that money for only a few days. Come home at Thanksgiving, that would be early enough, that would be fine. Uncle Herb was a little overconcerned, that was all. Gordon said abruptly into the telephone, “Tell him for me, I’m trying to not be a potzer, here. The work is at a crucial point.” His mother paused. Potzer was not really a polite word, too close to putzer. But she let it go. “That he’ll understand. So do I, Gordon. Do your work, yes.”
• • •
The university had arranged the press conference for Ramsey and Hussinger. There was a three-man team from the local CBS station, and the journalist who did the A University on Its Way to Greatness feature, as well as San Diego Union and Los Angeles Times men. Gordon stood in the back of the hall. There were slides of the results, pictures of Hussinger beside the testing tanks, graphs of the breakdown in the ocean ecosystems. The audience was impressed. Ramsey fielded questions well. Hussinger—an overweight, balding man with quick, black eyes—spoke with rapid-fire intensity. A reporter asked Ramsey what led him to conjecture that such terrible things could come from such an obscure cause. Ramsey skirted the issue. He glanced at Gordon and then made a vague remark about hunches coming out of nowhere. People you knew or worked with said something and then you put them together, all without really knowing where the initial spark was from. Oh, the reporter asked, was someone else at UCLJ working on things like this? Ramsey looked uneasy. “I don’t think I can say anything about that at this time,” he murmured. Gordon slipped out the back before the conference broke up. Outside, the air seemed smoky. He breathed deeply, felt dizzy, and coughed harshly. The shafts of sunlight had a shifting, watery look.
• • •
Hercules fell below the horizon around 9 p.m. now, so Gordon could shut down the rig reasonably early. There was still decoding work to be done, though, if he found any interruptions of the NMR traces. He got home reasonably early most of the time, for about a week. Then the noise level began to rise again. He received sporadic signals. Hercules was in the sky from midmorning until night. He spent the day taking data. Then, after 9 o’clock, he would prepare his lectures and grade papers. He began to stay later and later. Once he slept in his office overnight.
• • •
Penny looked up with surprise as he unlocked their front door. “Well, well. Run out of electricity?”
“No. Just finished early, that’s all.”
“Jesus, you look terrible.”
“A little tired.”
“Want some wine?”
“Not Brookside, if that’s what you’re drinking.”
“No, it’s Krug.”
“What was that Brookside doing around here?”
“For cooking.”
“Uh huh.”
He got some wine and some corn chips and sat down at the kitchen table. Penny was grading essays. The radio was blaring AM music. Don’t know much about history. Gordon frowned. Don’t know much biology. “Christ, turn that off.” Don’t know what a slide rule is for. Penny tilted her head to listen. “That’s one of my favorites, Gordon.” But I do know that I love you—
He got up suddenly and savagely snapped the switch over. “Bunch of know-nothing bullshit.”
“It’s a pretty song.”
Gordon made a dry laugh.
“Christ, what’s with you?”
“I just don’t like shit music played decibels too high.”
“I think you’re feeling screwed by the Ramsey and Hussinger thing.”
“No, that’s not it.”
“Well, why not? You let them take all the credit.”
“They deserved it.”
“It wasn’t their idea.”
“They can have it. What I’m working on is a lot bigger than that.”
“If it works out.”
“It’ll work. The signal is coming through better.”
“What does it say?”
“Some biochem stuff. More specs on tachyons.”
“That’s good? I mean, what can you use it for?”
“I’m sure it’s going to fit together, as soon as I get enough pieces. I’ve got to find just one clear statement that confirms my hunch, my guess, and that’ll lock it up.”
“What’s your hunch?”
Gordon shook his head silently.
“Come on. Look, you can tell me.”
“No. Nobody. I’m telling nobody until I’m sure. This whole thing is going to be mine. I don’t want word leaking out before I can nail it for sure.”
“Christ, Gordon, I’m Penny. Remember me?”
“Look, I’m not saying.”
“Goddamn, you’re getting completely screwed up in the head, you know that?”
“If you don’t like it, you can leave me alone.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I will, Gordon. Maybe I will.”
• • •
He found himself falling asleep in the day. He would jerk awake before the oscilloscope as though startled by some noise, instantly afraid that he had missed some data.
He taught his Classical Electricity and Magnetism class as though in a dream. He would drift from one blackboard to another, jotting down formulas in what he thought was a neat, readable print. He spoke facing the class, but he gave the impression of carrying on an internal debate with himself. Occasionally, after lecture, he would glance back at the boards before leaving, and be shocked at the cluttered lines of nearly unreadable scribbles.
• • •
Lakin avoided talking to Gordon about anything other than routine laboratory operations. Cooper, too, stayed in his small student’s office and seldom sought out Gordon, even when he was blocked on a particular point. Gordon rarely went up to the Physics Department office on the third floor any more. Secretaries had to seek him out in the laboratory. He brought his own lunch in a bag and ate it there, tending the NMR apparatus, fighting the recurring signal/noise problems, watching the jiggling yellow lines of the resonance curves.
• • •
“Dr. Bernstein?”
“Huh?” Gordon had been dozing in front of the scope. His eyes darted to the resonance lines, but they were undisturbed. Good; he had missed nothing. Only then did he look up at the slender man who stood inside the laboratory door.
“I’m from UPI. I’m doing a background story on the Ramsey-Hussinger results. They’ve excited an enormous amount of concern, you know. I thought I would look into the contributions made by other faculty to—”
“Why come to me?”
“I could not help but notice that you were the man Professor Ramsey kept looking at during their press conference. I wondered if you might he the ‘other sources’ Professor Ramsey recently admitted—”
“When did he say that?”
“Just yesterday, while I was interviewing him.”
“Shit.”
“What was that. Doctor? You seem rather concerned.”
“No, nothing. Look, I have nothing to say.”
“Are you sure, Doctor?”
“I said I have nothing to say. Now leave, please.”
The man opened his mouth. Gordon jerked his thumb toward the door. “Out, I said. Out”
• • •
G
ordon worked each day, gradually collecting fragments of sentences. They came out of sequence. The technical information was repetitious, probably to be sure it came through correctly, despite transmission and receiving errors. But why? he thought. This stuff fits my guesses, sure. But there must be an explanation in this text itself. A rational explanation, clearly set out. One evening he had a dream in which Uncle Herb was watching him play chess in Washington Square. His uncle frowned as Gordon moved the pieces across the squares and said over and over, in a disapproving voice, “God forbid there should not be a rational explanation.”
• • •
On the morning of Monday, November 5, he drove into work late. He had got into a pointless argument with Penny over minor domestic matters. He turned on the car radio to take his mind off it. The lead news item was that Maria Goeppert Mayer of UCLJ had won the Nobel Prize in physics. Gordon was so stunned by the news he barely recovered in time to make the turn at the top of Torrey Pines Road. A Lincoln blared its horn at him and the driver—a man in a hat driving with his lights on—glared. Mayer had won the prize for the shell model of the nucleus. She shared it with Eugene Wigner of Princeton and Hans Jensen, a German who had devised the shell model at about the same time as Maria.
The University held a press conference that afternoon. Maria Mayer was shy and soft-spoken beneath the barrage of questions. Gordon went to see. The questions asked were mostly dumb, but you expected that. The kindly woman who had stopped to inquire about his results, when the rest of the department was ignoring him, was now a Nobel Prize winner. The fact took a while to sink in. He had a sudden sense that things were converging at this place, this time. The research done here was important. There were the Carroways and their quasar riddle, Gell-Mann’s arrays of particles, Dyson’s visions, Marcuse and Maria Mayer and the news that Jonas Salk was coming to build an institute. La Jolla was a nexus. He was grateful to be here.
CHAPTER FORTY ONE
NOVEMBER 6, 1963
THE SIGNAL STRENGTH GOT ABRUPTLY BETTER. THERE were whole paragraphs about the Wheeler-Feynman theory. Gordon called Claudia Zinnes to see if the Columbia group was getting the same results.
“No, not for five days now,” she said. “First we had some equipment failure. Then the graduate student got the flu—the one that’s been going around. I think he was overtired. Those times you gave us—that’s ten, twelve hours in the lab, Gordon.”
“You mean you have nothing?”
“Not for those days, no.”
“Can’t you do some of the times yourself?”
“I will, starting tomorrow. I do have other things to do, you know.”
“Sure, yes. I want to have some confirmation, that’s all.”
“We have that now, Gordon. Of the effect, I mean.”
“It’s not only the effect that’s important. Claudia, look back over those signals. Think about what it means.”
“Gordon, I don’t think we know enough yet to—”
“Okay, I agree, basically. Most of my data is a jumble. Fragments. Pieces of sentences. Formulas. But there is a consistent feel to it.”
Her voice took on the precise, professional clarity he remembered from graduate school. “First the data, Gordon. Then we indulge in some theory, maybe.”
“Yeah, right.” He knew better than to argue with her on the philosophy of experimental physics. She had rather rigid views.
“I promise you, I start up tomorrow.”
“Okay, but it could fade by then. I mean—”
“Don’t kvetch, Gordon. Tomorrow we start again.”
• • •
It came less than three hours later, shortly after noon on Tuesday, November 6. Names, dates. The spreading bloom. The phrases describing this were clipped and tense. Parts were garbled. Letters were missing. One long passage, though, related how the experiments had begun and who was involved. These sentences were longer and more relaxed and almost conversational, as though someone were simply sending what came into his head.
—WITH MARKHAM GONE AND BLOODY DUMB RENFREW CARRYING ON THERE’S NO FUTURE IN OUR LITTLE PLAN NO PAST EITHER I SUPPOSE THE LANGUAGE CAN’T DEAL WITH IT BUT THE THING SHOULD HAVE WORKED IF—
There came a scramble of noise. The long passage disappeared and did not return. The terse biological information reappeared. There were missing words. The noise was rising like a tossing sea. Through the last staccato sentences there ran an unstated sense of desperation.
• • •
Penny saw something different in his face when he came into the kitchen. Her raised eyebrows asked a question.
“I got it today.” He surprised himself at the easy, blank way he could say it.
“Got what?”
“The answer, for Chrissake.”
“Oh. Oh.”
Gordon handed her a Xerox copy of his lab notebook. “So it really is the way you thought?”
“Apparently.” There was a quiet assurance in him now. He felt no pressing need to say anything about the result, no tension, not even a hint of the manic elation he had expected. The facts were there at last and they could speak for themselves.
“My God, Gordon.”
“Yeah. My God, indeed.”
There was a moment of silence between them. She put the Xerox page on the kitchen table and turned back to deboning a chicken. “Well, that should take care of your promotion.”
“It sure as hell should,” Gordon said with some relish.
“And maybe—” she gave him a sidelong look—“maybe you’ll be worth living with again.” The sentence had started out all right but by the end a bitter tone came into it. Gordon pursed his lips, irked.
“You haven’t made it any easier.”
“There are limits, Gordon.”
“Uh huh.”
“I’m not your goddam little wifey.”
“Yes, you made that brilliantly clear some time ago.”
She sniffed, lips pressed so tight they grew pale, and wiped her hands on a paper towel. Penny reached over and clicked on the radio. It began playing a Chubby Checker tune Gordon stepped forward and turned it off. She looked at him, saying nothing. Gordon picked up the Xeroxed page and put it in his jacket pocket, carefully folding it beforehand.
He said, “I think I’ll go do some reading.”
“You do that,” she said.
• • •
All through the afternoon of November 7 the noise level rose. It blotted out the signal most of the time. Gordon got a few words here and there, and a very clear RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2, and that was all. The coordinates made sense now. Up ahead in the future they would have a precise fix on where they would seem to be in the sky The solar apex was an average of the sun’s motion. Thirty-five years from now the earth would be in a location near the average motion. Gordon felt a certain relaxing in him as he watched the jittering noise. All the pieces fit now. Zinnes could confirm at least part of it. Now the question was how to present the data, how to build an airtight case that couldn’t be dismissed out of hand. A straightforward paper in The Physical Review? That would be the standard approach. The lead time on Phys Rev was at least nine months, though. He could publish in Physical Review Letters, but letters had to be short. How could Tie pack in all the experimental detail, plus the messages? Gordon smiled ruefully. Here he had an enormous result and he was dithering over how to present it. Showbiz.
• • •
Penny carried knives and forks to the table; Gordon brought the plates. The slatted blinds let in yellow swords of sun. She moved gracefully in this light, her face pensive.
They ate silently for a moment, both hungry. “I thought about your experiments today,” she began hesitantly.
“Yes?”
“I don’t understand them. To think of time that way…”
“I don’t see how it can make sense, either. It’s a fact, though.”
“And facts rule.”
“Well, sure. I kind of feel we’re looking at this the wr
ong way, though. Space-time must not work the way physicists think.”
She nodded and pushed potatoes around her plate, still pensive. “Thomas Wolfe. ‘Time, dark time, secret time, forever flowing like a river.’ I remember that from The Web and the Rock”
“Haven’t read it.”
“I looked up a Dobson poem today, thinking about you.” She took a paper from her books and handed it to him.
Time goes, you say? Ah, no!
Alas, time stays, we go.
He laughed. “Yeah, something like that.” He cut into a frankfurter with enthusiasm.
“Do you think people like Lakin are going to keep on questioning your work?”
He chewed judiciously. “Well, in the best sense, I hope they do. Every result in science has to stand up to criticism every day. Results have to be checked and rethought.”
“No, I meant—”
“I know, are they going to try to cut me off at the knees. I hope so.” He grinned. “If they push things further than legitimate scientific skepticism, they’ll have just that much farther to fall.”
“Well, I hope not.”
“Why?”
“Because—” her voice broke—“it’ll be hard on you, and I can’t take what it does to you any more.”
“Honey…”
“I can’t. You’ve been tight as a drum all summer and fall. And when I try to deal with it, I can’t get through to you and I start snapping at you and…”
“Honey…”
“Things get so impossible. I just…”
“God, I know. It runs away with me.”
She said quietly, “And me…”
“I start thinking about a problem and other things, other people, they just seem to get in the way.”
“It’s been my fault, too. I want a lot out of this, out of us, so much, and I’m not getting it.”
“We’ve been clawing at each other.”
She sighed. “Yeah.”
“I… I think the physics stuff isn’t going to be so bad from now on.”
“That… that’s what I hope. I mean, these last few days, they’ve been different. Better. It feels like a year ago, really. You’re relaxed, I’m not bugging you all the time to… I feel better about us. For the first time in ages.”
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