Timescape (17 page)

"entitlement syndrome." The old felt they had paid heavy taxes all along and then been put on the shelf before they could earn the immense salaries now going to junior executives. They were "entitled," the Senior Movement argued, and society had damned well better cough up. The oldsters voted more often and with a sharper eye for self-interest. They had power. In California a gray head had become a symbol of political activism.

"–they don't come out for weeks, with the spiffy televideo systems they buy. Saves 'em shopping or going to the bank or seeing anybody under sixty. They just do it all electronically. Kills the town, though. The oldest movie theater in La Jolla, the Unicom, closed last month. Damned shame."

Peterson nodded with a show of interest, still thinking about rearranging his schedule. The car swung into a steep driveway as the gate opened before it. They climbed up towards a long white house. Bastard Spanish, Peterson classified silently. Expensive, but without style. Kiefer parked in the carport and Peterson noticed bicycles and a wagon. Christ, children. If he had to share the dinner table with a crew of American brats–

It looked as though his fears were going to be realized when they were met at the door by two young boys jumping at Kiefer and both talking at once. Kiefer managed to quiet them down long enough to introduce them to Peterson. Both children then trained their attention on him. The older boy dispensed with preliminaries and asked directly, "Are you a scientist like my dad?" The younger fixed him with an unwinking stare, shifting from foot to foot in an irritating way. Of the two, he was potentially the noisier and more troublesome, Peterson decided. He knew the older boy's type–earnest, talkative, opinionated, and nearly uncrushable.

"Not exactly," he began, but was interrupted. "My dad is studying diatoms in the ocean," the boy said, dismissing Peterson. "It's very important. I'm going to be a scientist too when I grow up but maybe an astronomer and David's going to be an astronaut but he's only five so he doesn't really know. Would you like to see the model of the solar system I made for our science project?"

"No, no, Bill," Kiefer answered hastily. "I know it's very nice but Mr.

Peterson doesn't want to be bothered now. We're going to have a drink and talk about grown-up things." He led the way to the living room, followed by Peterson and the two boys. Kiefer would be the sort of parent who called adults "grown-ups," Peterson thought drily.

"I can talk about grown-up things too," Bill said indignantly.

"Yes, yes, of course you can. What I meant was, we're going to talk about things that wouldn't interest you. What'll you have to drink? Can I offer you a whisky and soda, wine, tequila ... ?"

"How do you know they wouldn't interest me, lots of things interest me," the child persisted, before Peterson could answer. The situation was saved by a light, firm voice calling from another room. "Boys! Come here at once, please!" The two vanished without argument. Peterson stored for future use the verbal backhand he had been about to deal the older boy.

"I see you have some Pernod there. Could I have a Pernod and tequila, with a dash of lemon, if you please?"

"Jeez, what a mixture. Is it good? I don't often drink hard liquor myself.

Liver, y'know. Sit down, I'm pretty sure we have some lemon juice My wife will know. Does that drink have a name or did you invent it?" Kiefer was acting erratically again.

"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 his 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, tilting 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 non-smoking 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. Peterson 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 tacit 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 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 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 already arrived. It 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 far, 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 undoubtedly is 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 is 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.