Gordon blinked and for a moment he seemed to lose his balance. Senior Scholastic. The rec room swam in its pale, musty light.
Then Cronkite was talking again in that reedy voice. At Parkland Memorial Hospital a brief press conference had just concluded, while Hayes was speaking. Malcolm Kilduff, assistant press secretary to the President, had described the wound. A bullet had entered the lower back of the President’s neck. It had passed through and left a small exit wound. The entry wound was larger and bled freely. The President had received several pints of O RH negative blood as well as 300 mg. hydrocortisone intravenously. At first the attending physicians had inserted a tube to clear the President’s breathing passage. This failed. The senior physician, Michael Cosgrove, elected to perform a tracheotomy. This took five minutes. Lactated Ringer’s solution—a modified saline solution—was fed into the right leg via catheter. The President began breathing well, though he was still in coma. His dilated eyes were open and staring directly into a glaring fluorescent lamp overhead. A nasogastric tube was thrust through Kennedy’s nose and fitted behind his trachea, to clear away possible sources of nausea in his stomach. Bilateral chest tubes were placed in both chest pleural spaces to suck out damaged tissue and prevent lung collapse. The President’s heartbeat was weak but regular. The exit wound was treated first, since the President was on his back. Three doctors then rolled the body onto its side. The entry wound gaped, larger than the exit wound by more than twice, and was the principal point of blood loss. It was treated without difficulty. Kennedy was still in Trauma Room No. 1 of Parkland as Kilduff spoke. His condition appeared stable. There was no apparent damage to the brain. His right lung was bruised. His windpipe was ripped apart. It appeared that, barring complications, he would live.
Mrs. Kennedy was not hit. Governor Connally was in critical condition. The Vice President was not hit. The attending physicians could make no comment on the number of shots fired. It was clear, however, that only one bullet had struck the President.
• • •
The crowd around the television murmured and stirred. The sensation of lightness and pressing heat had gone. Objects no longer swayed as though seen underwater, refracted. Gordon shouldered his way through the close-packed students. Speculations buzzed around him. He slid aside the glass door to the wooden deck and stepped through. Without thinking he vaulted over the railing and out onto the parking lot. He got his running gear out of the trunk of the Chevy. He changed in the nearby men’s room. In shorts and tennis shoes he looked as young as many of the students still flocking to the rec room in search of news. He felt an airy sense of liberation and a humming, random energy, almost pleasurable. He did not want to think just now.
He began to run on the flat, watery sand. A steady breeze came in, blowing strands of black hair across his eyes. He ran with his head down, watching his feet strike. When his heel hit the sand a pale circle leaped into being as the water rushed out, driven by the impact. The beach hardened under each step, upholding him, and dissolved back to a gray slate sameness behind him. A helicopter passed whump whump whump overhead.
He skirted the town and ran through crescent coves, heading south, until he reached Nautilus Street. Penny was grading papers. He told her the news. She wanted to turn on the radio, learn more, but he tugged her away. Reluctantly she went with him. They went to the beach and walked south. Neither spoke. Penny fidgeted, face cloudy. The sea breeze scuffed the tops from the whitecaps and furled a banner of foam from each. Gordon looked at them and thought about them coming across the Pacific, driven by tides and winds. They were shallow out in the ocean and moved fast. As they neared the land the sea bed reared up beneath them and they deepened and slowed. Coming in, a wave moved faster at the top than at the bottom and they toppled forward, the energy from out of Asia churning into turbulence.
Penny called to him. She was already charging into the shallows. He followed. It was the first time he had tried this but that did not matter. They swam out beyond the waves and waited for the next big one to come in. It moved with stately slowness. The dark blue line thickened and rose and Gordon looked at it and estimated where it would break. He pulled forward, stroking fast and kicking. Penny was ahead. He felt something picking him up and the water ahead fell away. A rushing sound, and he moved faster. He flung out his arms and leaned to the left. Spray hazed his eyes. He blinked. He cut down the face of the wave, cupped in a wall of water, curling and churning toward the shore.
CHAPTER FORTY FIVE
1998
JOHN RENFREW WORKED THROUGH THE NIGHT. HE had the temporary power supply going and he was damned if he’d stop while the fuel held out. If he stopped he could not be sure of getting it started again. Better to go on and see what would happen. Then he could have no regrets.
He grimaced. See what would happen? Or had happened? Or could happen? Human language did not fit the physics. There was no tense of the verb to be that reflected the looping sense of time. No way to turn the language on the pivot of physics, to apply a torque that would make the paradoxes dissolve into an ordered cycle, endlessly turning.
He had let the technicians go. They were needed at home. Outside, on the Coton footpath, no bicycles, no movement. Families were home, tending the ill, or else had fled to the countryside. He felt a twinge of the dysentery that had come in the night. A brush with the gnawing £tuff from the clouds, he guessed. He had been drinking from a store of bottled fruit drinks he’d found in the cafeteria, and eating packaged foods. For two days he’d been here, alone, not pausing to go home for a change of clothes. The world as he had lived in it was closing down, that much was clear from the windows of the lab. Since early morning a plume of oily smoke had furled upward in the distance; obviously no one was trying to put it out.
He tuned the apparatus gingerly. Tap tap. Tap tap. The tachyon noise level remained constant. He had been transmitting the new message about the neurojacket process for days now, mixing it with the RA and DEC monotony Peterson had phoned new biological sentences in from his London office. The man had sounded strained and hurried. The content of the message, as nearly as Renfrew could understand it, explained why. If the California group was right, this thing could spread through the cloud-seed mechanism with blinding speed.
Renfrew tapped patiently on his Morse key, hoping he had the focusing right. It was so bloody difficult to know if you had the rig aimed. A slight error in targeting the beam put it at the wrong x, and thus at the wrong t. He had got through once, that they’d learned from Peterson’s bank vault. But how could he check now, if the pulsing coils were a microsecond slow, or the fringing fields throwing the beam a degree to the left? He had only his sandy-eyed calibrations to trust. He was adrift here, in a world where t was time and tea was brine and x for space, x for the unknown floated in the air before him, a passing pattern.
He shook himself. The lab stool pinched his buttocks. He had less fat there, now; must have lost weight. Have to put on some extra ballast, yes.
Tap tap tap. Out went the Morse cadences. Tap tap.
Maybe the weight loss explained why the room rippled and stretched as he watched. Christ, he was tired. A wan anger welled up in him. He had been taptaptapping out biological stuff and coordinates and the lot, all impersonal and—he was sure of it now—in the end, all useless. Bloody boring, it was. He reached over and took up the identifying passage he had been transmitting regularly, and began sending it again. But this time he added a few comments of his own, about how this whole thing got started, and Markham’s ideas, and Peterson the stiff-faced bastard, and the lot, all the way up to Markham’s crash. It felt good to get it all down, pushing the words out in Morse as he thought of them. He told it in ordinary sentences, not the clipped telegraph style they’d adopted for compressing the biological information. It was a relief to tell it, really. The whole sodding thing was pointless, the beam was pouring down some unsuspected cosmic rathole, anyway, so why not enjoy the last shot? Tap tap. Here’s my life story, mate, w
ritten on the head of a pin. Tap tap. Into the void. Tap tap.
But after a while the momentum left him and he stopped. His shoulders sagged.
The scope screen rippled and the tachyon noise level rose. Renfrew peered at it. Tap tap. On impulse he flipped off the transmitting switch. The past be damned for a moment. He watched the scramble of curves arc and intersect, dancing. For brief snatches of time the noise resolved into these snakings across the screen. Signals, clearly. Someone else was transmitting.
Regular jolts of wave forms, evenly spaced. Renfrew copied them.
ATTEMPT CONTACT FROM 2349 IN TAC
and a blur of noise again, swallowing all.
English. Somebody sending in English. From the year 2349? Perhaps. Or maybe with tachyons in the 234.9 kilovolt range. Or maybe it was a fluke, a sport.
Renfrew slurped cold coffee. He had made a thermos days ago and forgotten it. He hoped the water was okay. The coffee hadn’t the dog’s fur flavor he remembered; more like scorched earth. He shrugged and drank it without thinking further.
He felt his brow. Sweat. A fever. A strange, distant mutter came to him. Voices? He went to look, surprised at his weakness, at the lurking ache in his ankles and thighs. Should get more exercise, he thought automatically, and then laughed. Scuffling noises. Had they heard him? He lurched down a corridor. But there was no one about. Only the sound of the wind. That, and the gritty scraping of his own shoes on the bare concrete.
He went back and stared at the scope. His throat burned. He tried to think calmly and cleanly about what Markham had said so long ago. The micro-universes were not like black holes, not in the sense that inside them all matter was compressed into infinite densities. Instead, their average density was a reasonable number, though higher than ours. They had formed in the early moments of the universe and been forever isolated, living out microlives inside a folded geometry. Wickham’s new field equations showed they were out there, between the clusters of galaxies. An x and t we cannot see, he thought, apart from me and thee. Now there was a literary flourish for you, worthy of the last edition of the Times. The very last edition.
Abruptly he sat, feeling dizzy. An ache behind his eyes, spreading. Matter was swallowed into the net of space-time, of differential geometries. G times n. A tachyon could wing out of the knots, a free phoenix, its flight ordained by the squiggles and jots of Markham and Wickham. Renfrew shivered as the cold seeped into him.
Another set of bursts. He scribbled them on a pad. The scratching pen cut the silence.
MENT ENHANCE RESONANCE STRUCTURE BY TUNING TO SIDEBAND CARRIER
and then the sea of noise again, the waves lost.
This all meant something to someone, but who? Where? When? Another:
AMSK WEDLRUF XSMDOPRDHTU AS WTEU WEHRTU
Wrong language? A code from across the galaxy, from across the universe? This apparatus opened up communication with everywhere, everywhen, instantly. Talk to the stars. Talk to the compressed beings inside a dot of space. A telegram from Andromeda would take less time than one from London. Tachyons sleeted through the laboratory, through Renfrew, bringing word. It was within their grasp, if only they had time…
He shook his head. All form and structure was eroded by the overlapping of many voices, a chorus. Everyone was talking at once and no one could hear.
The roughing pumps coughed. Tachyons of size 10-13 centimeters were flashing across whole universes, across 1028 centimeters of cooling matter, in less time than Renfrew’s eye took to absorb a photon of the pale laboratory light. All distances and times were wound in upon each other, singularities sucking up the stuff of creation. Event horizons rippled and worlds coiled into worlds. There were voices in this room, voices clamoring, touching—
Renfrew stood up and suddenly clutched at a scope mount for support. Christ, the fever. It clawed at him, ran glowing smoke fingers through his mind.
ATTEMPT CONTACT FROM 2349. All thought of reaching the past was gone now, he realized, blinking. The room veered, then righted itself. With Markham gone and the Wickham woman missing for days, there was no longer even any hope of understanding what had happened. Causality’s leaden hand would win out. The soothing human world of flowing time would go on, a Sphinx yielding none of her secrets. An infinite series of grandfathers would live out their lives safe from Renfrew.
ATTEMPT CONTACT, the scope sputtered again.
But unless he knew where and when they were, there was no hope of answering.
Hello, 2349. Hello out there. This is 1998, an x and t in your memory. Hello. ATTEMPT CONTACT.
Renfrew smiled with flinty irony Whispers came flitting, embedding soft words of tomorrow in the indium. Someone was there. Someone brought hope.
The room was cold. Renfrew huddled by his instruments, perspiring, peering at the bursts of waves. He was like a South Sea islander, watching the airplanes draw their stately lines across the sky, unable to shout up to them. I am here. Hello, 2349. Hello.
He was trying a modification of the signal correlator when the lights winked out. Utter blackness rushed in. The distant generator rattled and chugged into silence.
It took a long time to feel his way out and into the light. It was a bleak, gray noon, but he did not notice; it was enough to be outside.
He could hear no sound from Cambridge at all. The breeze carried a sour tang. No birds. No aircraft.
He walked south, towards Grantchester. He looked back once at the low square profile of the Cav and in the diffused light he raised a hand to it. He thought of the nested universes, onion skin within onion skin. Leaning back, head swimming, he peered at the clouds, once so benign a sight. Above that cloak was the galaxy, a great swarm of colored lights, turning with majestic slowness in the great night. Then he looked down at the bumpy, worn footpath and felt a great weight lift from him. For so long now he had been transfixed by the past. It had deadened him to this real world around him. He knew, now, without knowing quite how he knew, that it was forever lost. Rather than feeling despair, he was elated, free.
Marjorie lay up ahead, no doubt frightened to be alone. He remembered her preserves on the uncompromising straight shelving, and smiled. They could eat those for some time. Have some easy meals together, as they did in the days before the children. They would soon have to go to the countryside and get Johnny and Nicky, of course.
Puffing slightly, his head clearing, he walked along the deserted path. There was really quite a lot ahead to do, when you thought about it.
CHAPTER FORTY SIX
OCTOBER 28, 1974
HE WALKED FROM HIS HOTEL ON CONNECTICUT AVENUE. The reception was to be a buffet lunch, the letter said, so Gordon had slept in until eleven. He had long ago learned that on short trips to the east it was best to grant nothing to the myth of time zones, and keep to his western schedule. Invariably this fit the demands on an out-of-town visitor anyway, since such occasions were excuses for lingering over sauce-drenched entrees in expensive restaurants, followed by earnest, now-that-we’re-away-from-the-office-I-can-speak-frankly revelations over several cups of coffee, and then late night stumblings-to-bed. Arising at ten the next morning seldom got him to the NSF or AEC later than the executives themselves, since he ate no breakfast.
He tramped through the city zoo; it was more or less along the way. Yellow canine eyes followed him, contemplating the results if the bars were suddenly lifted. Chimps swung in pendulum strokes on an unending circuit of their cramped universe. The natural world was a pocket here amid distant honks and looming, square profiles of sour brown brick. Gordon savored the clammy fullness of the breeze that had tunneled its way up from the Potomac. He welcomed this traveler’s brush with the seasons, punctuations to the extended sentences of the months, a welcome relief from California’s monotonous excellence.
He had first come here with his mother and father. That tourist’s orbit was now a dim set of memories from a corner of his preadolescence, the period of life that he supposed was everybody’s golden age. H
e remembered being awed at the sleek white glow of the Washington Monument and the White House. For years afterward he was certain these solemn edifices were what was meant when his grammar school class sang “America” and chorused about alabaster majesties. “The country, it really begins in Washington,” his mother had said, not forgetting to add the pedagogical “D.C.,” so that her son would never confuse it with the state. And Gordon, towed through the list of historic shrines, saw what she meant. Beyond the Frenchified design of the city center lay a rural park, land that breathed of Jefferson and tree-traced boulevards. To him Washington had ever since been the entranceway to a vast republic where crops sprouted under a WASP sun. There, blue-eyed blonds drove yellow roadsters that left dust plumes on the open roads as they roared from one country fair to the next, women won prizes for strawberry preserves and men drank watery beer and kissed girls who had been struck from the template of Doris Day. He had gazed upward at the Spirit of St. Louis hanging like a paralyzed moth in the Smithsonian, and wondered how a cornhusker city—“without a single good college in it,” his mother sniffed—could flap wings and scoot aloft.
Gordon thrust his hands into his pockets for warmth and walked. The corners of his mouth perked up in an airy mirth. He had learned a lot about the huge Country beyond Washington, most of it from Penny. Their mutual abrasions had healed over in the aftermath of 1963 and they had found again the persistent chemistry that had first drawn them into their mutual bound orbits, circles centered on a point midway between them. The thing between them was not a geometric dot but rather a small sun, igniting between them a passion Gordon felt was deeper than anything that had happened to him before. They were married in late 1964. Her father, just plain Jack, put on a massive wedding, glittery and champagne-steeped. Penny wore the traditional white. She made a downward-turning leer whenever anyone mentioned it. She had come with him to Washington that winter, when he was making his first big presentation to the NSF for a major grant of his own. His talk went well and Penny fell in love with the National Gallery, going every day to see the Vermeers. Together they ate shellfish with luminaries from the NSF and strolled down from the Congressional dome to the Lincoln Monument. They did not mind the raw, cold damp then; it went with the scenery. Everything had seemed to go with everything else.
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