Gordon checked the address and found that he had another block to go. He had always been intrigued by the contrasts of Washington. This busy street brimmed with its own importance, yet intersecting it were thinner avenues of small shops, decaying houses, and corner grocery stores. Old black men leaned in doorways, their large brown eyes surveying the tax-funded bustle. Gordon waved to one and, turning a corner, discovered a mammoth courtyard. It had the austere French style of 1950s Government Classical, with conical evergreens standing like sentries at the abrupt, uncompromising corners. Regimented bushes led the eye, willing or not, into remorseless perspectives.
Well, he thought, blocky and self-important architecture or no, this was it. He teetered back on his heels to look. Granite facings led upward into a bland sky. He took his hands out of his pockets and brushed hair back from his eyes. Already there was the giveaway thinning of the crown, he knew, sure sign that his father’s baldness would find echo in his own forties.
He pushed open a series of three glass doors. The spaces between seemed to serve as air locks, preserving inside a dry heat. Ahead were tables with luxuriant linen draped over them. In the center of the carpeted foyer, knots of suited men. Gordon pushed through the last air lock and into a hushed buzz of talk. Thick drapes swallowed sounds, giving the air a solemnity found in mortuaries. To the left, a band of receptionists. One detached herself and came toward him. She was wearing a long, cream-colored silky thing Gordon would have taken for an evening gown if it were not midday. She asked for his name. He gave it slowly. “Oh,” she said, eyes round, and went to one of the draped tables. She returned with a name tag, not the usual plastic, but a sturdy wooden frame housing a stark white board with his name in calligraphy. She pinned it on him. “We do want our guests to look their best today,” she said with abstract concern, and brushed imaginary lint from his coat sleeve. Gordon warmed at the attention and forgave her efficient gloss. Other men, all suited, most in basic bureaucratic black, were filling the foyer. The receptionists met them with a volley of name tags—plastic, he noted—and seating assignments and admission cards. In a corner a woman who looked like an executive secretary helped a frail white-haired man from his immense, weighty overcoat. He moved with delicate, hesitant gestures, and Gordon recognized him as Jules Chardaman, the nuclear physicist who had discovered some particle or other and received a Nobel for his trouble. I thought he was dead, Gordon mused.
“Gordon! Tried to call you last night,” called a brisk voice behind him.
He turned, hesitated, and shook hands with Saul Shriffer. “I got in late and went out for a walk.”
“In this town?”
“It seemed safe.”
Saul shook his head. “Maybe they don’t mug dreamers.”
“I probably don’t look prosperous enough.”
Saul flashed his nationally known smile. “Naw, you’re looking great. Hey, how’s the wife? She with you?”
“Oh, she’s fine. She’s been visiting her parents—you know, showing off the kids. She’s flying in this morning, though.” He glanced at his watch. “Should be here soon.”
“Hey, great, like to see her again. How about dinner tonight?”
“Sorry, we’ve got plans.” Gordon realized he had said this too quickly and added, “Maybe tomorrow, though. How long will you be in town?”
“I have to zip over to New York by noon. I’ll catch you next time I’m on the coast.”
“Fine.”
Saul unconsciously pursed his lips, as though considering how to put his next sentence. “You know, those parts of the old messages you kept to yourself…”
Gordon kept his face blank. “Just the names, that’s all. My public statement is that they were lost in the noise. Which is partly true.”
“Yeah.” Saul studied his face. “Look, after all this much time, it seems to me—look, it would make a really interesting sidelight on the whole thing.”
“No. Come on, Saul, we’ve had this discussion before.”
“It’s been years. I fail to see—”
“I’m not sure I got the names right. A letter here and there and you’ve got the wrong name and the wrong people.”
“But look—”
“Forget it. I’m never going to release the parts I’m not sure about.” Gordon smiled to take the edge off his voice. There are other reasons, too, but he wasn’t going to go into that.
Saul shrugged goodnaturedly and fingered his newly grown moustache. “Okay, okay. Just thought I’d give it a try, catch you in a mellow mood. How’re the experiments going?”
“We’re still hammering away at the sensitivity. You know how it is.”
“Getting any signals?”
“Can’t say. The hash is unbelievable.”
Saul frowned. “There should be something there.”
“Oh, there is.”
“No, I mean besides that stuff you got back in ’67. I’ll grant you that was a clear message. But it wasn’t in any code or language we know.”
“The universe is a big place.”
“You think they were from a long way off?”
“Look, anything I say is pure guess. But it was a strong signal, tightly beamed. We were able to show that the fact that it lasted three days and then shut off was due to the earth passing through a tachyon beam. I’d say we just got in the way of somebody else’s communications net.”
“Ummm.” Saul pondered this. “Y’know, if we could only be sure those messages we can’t decode weren’t from a human transmitter, far up in the future…”
Gordon grinned. Saul was one of the biggest names in science now, at least in the public eye. His popularizations made the bestseller lists, his television series ran in prime time. Gordon finished for him, “You mean, we’d have proof of an alien technology.”
“Sure. Worth trying, isn’t it?”
“Maybe so.”
The big bronze doors at the end of the foyer swung back. The crowd shuffled toward the reception room beyond. Gordon had noted that people in groups move as though by a slow diffusion process, and this mob was no different. Many he knew—Chet Manahan, a methodical solid state physicist who always wore a vest with matching tie, spoke five languages, and made sure you knew this within a few minutes of meeting him; Sidney Roman, a swarthy, delicate, thin man whose precise equations led to outrageous conclusions, some of which had proved right; Louisa Schwartz, who, contrary to her name, had luminous white skin and a mind that catalogued everything in astrophysics, including most of the unprintable gossip; George Maklin, red-faced and loud, shoulders rippling with muscle, who carried out experiments suspended by whiskers into liquid helium, measuring wisps of momentum; Douglas Karp, a czar of a rabble of graduate students which cranked out two papers a month on the band structure of assorted solids, enabling him to lecture in sunny summer schools in the Mediterranean; Brian Nantes, with enormous, booming energy which in his papers squeezed into adroit, laconic equations, denuded of commentary or argument with his contemporaries, with a decidedly pearls-before-swine abstract to accompany the text—and many more, some casually met at conferences, others opposed in heated sessions of APS meetings, most of them dim faces associated with the stutter of initials beneath interesting papers, or met at a sandwich-and-beer faculty lunch just before delivering a seminar, or seen receiving polite applause at a meeting after they had mumbled an invited paper into a microphone. In this pack Saul drifted away, halfway through describing a plan to ferret out extraterrestrials by the squiggles and beeps in the tachyon spectrum. Gordon could do the observations, see, and Saul would look at the data and see what they meant.
Gordon wormed away diagonally, letting a rapidly talking clump of particle physicists come between him and Saul. The buffet lunch lay dead ahead of him. Characteristically, the scientists wasted no time politely hanging back from the self-serve table. Gordon piled beef on bread and escaped with a presentable sandwich. He bit in. The sting of the horseradish cleared his sinuses, watering his eyes.
The punch was a superior grade of champagne diluted with pungent orange juice.
Shriffer was surrounded now by a crescent of approving faces. It was odd, how celebrity invaded science these days, so that appearing on the Johnny Carson show was more effective with the NSF than publishing a brilliant series of papers in Physical Review.
Yet in the end it was media fixation that had done it all, Gordon reflected. At the conclusion of the press conference of Ramsey and Hussinger, Gordon had felt the constricting heat flow through him and seem to wash through the air. Then, watching Cronkite talk grimly into the camera on November 22, he had felt it again. Was that the signature of a true, unavoidable paradox? Was that when the future had radically altered? There was no way to tell, at least not yet. He had pored over records of atmospheric phenomena, of cosmic ray counts, of radio noise and starlight fluence—and found nothing. There were no instruments yet designed which could measure the effect. Gordon felt, though, that he had a subjective perception of when it had happened. Perhaps because he was close to the site where the paradoxes were driven home? Or because he was already strung out, as Penny would’ve put it, that is, fine-tuned? He might never know.
A passing face nodded. “Quite a day,” Isaac Lakin said formally, and moved on. Gordon nodded. The remark was suitably ambiguous. Lakin had become a director at the NSF, shepherding the magnetic resonance work. Gordon’s controversial area, tachyon detection, was under another man. Lakin was now best known for his coauthorship of the “spontaneous resonance” paper in PRL. The refracted fame had lifted him, agreeably buoyant, into his present position.
The other coauthor, Cooper, had done reasonably well, too. His thesis went through the committee with slick speed, once stripped of the spontaneous resonance effects. He had gone off to Penn State with evident relief. There, postdoccing his way through some respectable electron spin work led to a faculty position. He was now safely worrying various III-V compounds into yielding up their transport coefficients. Gordon saw him at meetings and they had an occasional drink together, sharing wary conversation.
He eavesdropped on gossip about revival of the Orion spaceship idea, and new work by Dyson. Then, as Gordon was fetching another sandwich and talking to a reporter, a particle physicist approached. He wanted to talk over plans for a new accelerator which had a chance of producing a tachyon cascade. The energy required was enormous. Gordon listened politely. When a revealing skeptical smile began to spread over his face, he forced his lips back into an expression of professorial consideration. The high-energy types were struggling to make tachyons now, but most outside observers felt the effort was premature. Better theory was needed. Gordon had chaired several panels on the subject and had grown thick-skinned about new, big-money proposals. The particle physicists were addicted to their immense accelerators. The man who has only a hammer to work with finds that every new problem needs a nail.
Gordon nodded, looked sage, sipped champagne, said little. Though the evidence for tachyons was now overwhelming, they did not fit into the standard ongoing program of physics. They were more than simply a new species of particle. They couldn’t be put on the shelf beside the mesons and hyperons and kaons. Before this physicists had, with the instincts of accountants, decomposed the world into a comfortable zoology. The other, simpler particles had only minor differences. They fit into the universe like marbles in a sack, filling but not altering the fabric. Tachyons didn’t. They made new theories possible, kicking up the dust of cosmological questions by their mere existence. The implications were being worked out.
Beyond that, though, were the messages themselves. They had ceased in 1963, before Zinnes could get extensive confirmation. Some physicists thought they were real. Others, forever wary of sporadic phenomena, thought they must have been some fortuitous error. The situation had a lot in common with Joe Weber’s detection of gravitational waves in 1969. Later experiments by others had found no waves. Did that mean Weber was wrong, or that the waves came in occasional bursts? It might be decades before another flurry could settle the question. Gordon had talked to Weber, and the wiry, silver-maned experimenter seemed to take the whole thing as a kind of inevitable comedy. In science you usually can’t convert your opponents, he had said; you have to outlive them. For Weber there was hope; Gordon felt his own case was forever uncheckable.
The new theory by Tanninger certainly pointed the way. Tanninger had put tachyons into the general relativity theory in a highly original way. The old question that came up in quantum mechanics, of who the observer was, had finally been resolved. Tachyons were a new kind of wave phenomenon, causality waves looping between past and future, and the paradoxes they could produce gave a new kind of physics. The essence of paradox was the possibility of mutually contradictory outcomes, and Tanninger’s picture of the causal loop was like that of the quantum-mechanical waves. The difference came in the interpretation of the experiment. In Tanninger’s picture, a kind of wave function, resembling the old quantum function, gave the various outcomes of the paradox loop. But the new wave function did not describe probabilities—it spoke of different universes. When a loop was set up, the universe split into two new universes. If the loop was of the simple killing-your-grandfather type, then there would result one universe where the grandfather lived and the grandson disappeared. The grandson reappeared in a second universe, having traveled back in time, where he shot his grandfather and lived out his life, passing through the years which were forever altered by his act. No one in either universe thought the world was paradoxical.
All this came from using tachyons to produce the standing-wave kind of time loop. Without tachyons, no splitting info different universes occurred. Thus the future world that had sent Gordon the messages was gone, unreachable. They had separated sometime in the fall of 1963; Gordon was sure of that. Some event had made Renfrew’s experiment impossible or unnecessary. It could have been the Ramsey-Hussinger press conference, or putting the message in the safety deposit box, or the Kennedy thing. One of those, yes. But which?
He moved among the crowd, greeting friends, letting his mind drift. He recalled that a human being, eating and moving around, gave off 200 watts of body heat. This room trapped most of it, bringing prickly perspiration to his brow. His Adam’s apple snagged on the knot of his tie.
“Gordon!” a silvery voice called to him above the tangle of talk. He turned. Marsha threaded her way through the crowd. He bent and kissed her. She was toting an overnight case, swinging it with abandon as she turned to call hellos to people she knew. She told him about the crush of traffic getting into town after her shuttle flight from LaGuardia, eyebrows darting upward to underline a word, hands describing averted collisions with swooping arcs. The prospect of a few days of freedom from the children gave her a manic, gay air that spread to Gordon. He realized he had grown somber as this overheated, glittery reception went on, and Marsha had erased that in a moment. It was this quality in her, of swelling life, that he remembered best when he was away from her. “Oh, God, there’s that Lakin,” she said, eyes rolling up in a parody of panic. “Let’s move the opposite way, I don’t want to start off with him.” Wifely loyalty. She tugged him to the shrimp salad, which he had passed over, probably following instinctively a genetically ingrained dietary axiom. Marsha snared a few of their friends along the way—to form a protective barrier against Lakin, she said. All this was done with comic exaggeration, drawing chuckles from the somber faces. A waiter sought them out and delivered glasses of champagne. “Ummm, I’ll bet this isn’t what’s in the bowl over there,” Marsha said, sipping, lips puckered in approval. The waiter hesitated, then agreed, “The Chairman said to bring out some of the private stock,” and then was gone, fearing he had revealed too much. Marsha seemed to polarize the medium, Gordon noted, drawing friends out of corners of the large room to form a cloud around them. Carroway appeared, shaking hands, chuckling. Gordon basked in her compact energy. He had never been able to relax so with Penny, he remembered, and maybe that
should have told him something from the start. In 1968, when they were in the thick of their last elaborate sparring, he and Penny had come to Washington in winter again. It was a veiled city. Fog rose from the Potomac’s shifting currents. He had avoided dinner parties with physicists that trip, he recalled, mostly because Penny found them boring and he could not predict when she would get into one of her political arguments or, worse, descend into a swollen silence. They had areas they had silently agreed not to talk about, areas which expanded in time. Each had axes to grind—you’re an injustice collector, Penny had accused, once—but, perversely, the good periods between the bad had become radiant with a released energy. He had oscillated in mood through 1967 and ’68, not buying Penny’s Freud-steeped recipes for repair, but discovering no alternative. Isn’t it a little obvious to be so hostile to analysis? she said once, and he had realized it was so; he felt the clanky, machinelike language was a betrayal, a trap. Psychology had modeled itself after the hard sciences, with physics as the shining example. But they had taken the old Newtonian clockwork as their example. To modern physics there was no ticktock world independent of the observer, no untouched mechanism, no way of describing a system without being involved in it. His intuition told him that no such exterior analysis could capture what rubbed and chafed between them. And so, in the descending days of 1968 his personal nucleus had fissioned, and a year later he met Marsha Gould from the Bronx, Marsha, short and dusky, and some inevitable paradigm had come home. Remembering the events now, seeing them sealed in amber, he smiled as Marsha brimmed beside him.
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