Timescape (27 page)

"Yeah, okay. Rushed? Why?"

"Shriffer. He thinks he's decoded something and all of a sudden he's on TV. Wasn't my idea."

"Oh. Oh, yeah. Makes it different." Ramsey seemed mollified. Then his face clouded again. "What about the first message?"

"What about it?"

"You releasing it?"

"No. No plans to."

"Good. Good."

"You can have all the time to work on it you want."

"Fine." Ramsey held out his hand as though a deal had just been concluded. "I'll be in touch."

Gordon shook the hand solemnly.

The bit of playacting with Ramsey had bothered him at first but he realized it was part of dealing with people: you had to adopt their voice, see things from their point of view, if you wanted to communicate at all.

Ramsey saw all this as a game with the first message as privileged information, and Shriffer as simply an interloper. Well, for the purposes of Ramsey's universe, so be it. At one time when he was younger, Gordon would have been rudely cynical about striking a stance purely to convince someone. Now matters seemed different. He wasn't lying to Ramsey. He wasn't withholding information. He was merely tailoring the way he described the events. Adolescent cliches about truth and beauty and bird thou never weft were just crap, simplistic categories. When you had to get something done you talked the talk. That was the way it was. Ramsey would keep on with the experiments without fretting over unknowables, and, with luck, they might find out something. He was walking away from the Physics building, toward Torrey Pines Road where his Chevy was parked, when a slight figure raised a hand in salutation. Gordon turned and recognized Maria Goeppert Mayer, the only woman in the department. She had suffered a stroke some time before and now appeared seldom, moving ghostlike through the hallways, one side partially impaired, her speech slurred. Her face sagged and she seemed tired, but in the eyes Gordon could see a dancing intelligence that let nothing slip by.

"Do you believe your ... re ... results?" she asked.

Gordon hesitated. Under her penetrating gaze he felt himself beneath the microscope of history; this woman had come out of Poland, passed through the war years, worked on the separation of uranium isotopes for the Manhattan Project at Columbia, done research with Fermi just before cancer caught him. She had come through all that and more: her husband, Joe, was a brilliant chemist and held a full professorship at Chicago, while she was denied a faculty position and had to be content with a research associate position. He wondered suddenly if she had been irritated at that while she did the work on the shell model of the nucleus that made her famous. Compared to what she faced, his troubles were nothing. He bit his lip.

"Yes. Yes, I think so. Something ... something is trying to reach us. I don't know what."

She nodded. There was a serene confidence in the way she did it, despite her numbed side, that clutched at something in Gordon. He blinked in sunset's lancing light, and the glow turned to warm water in his eyes. "Good. Good," she murmured with a halting tongue, and moved away, still smiling at him.

He arrived home just after Penny, and found her changing clothes. He dumped his briefcase, carrying the cares of the day, into a corner. "Where to?" he asked.

"Surf's up."

"Christ, it's getting dark."

"Waves don't know that."

He sagged against the wall. Her energy staggered him. This was the facet of California he found hardest: the sheer physicality of it, the momentum.

"Come with me," she said, pulling. on a French bikini brief and a T-shirt. "I'll show you how. You can body surf."

"Uh," he said, not wanting to mention ghat he had looked forward to a glass of white wine and the evening news. After all, he thought–and suddenly not quite liking the thought–there might be a followup on the Shriffer story.

"Come on."

At Windansea Beach he watched her carve a path down the slope of a descending wave and wondered at it: a frail girl, mastering a blunt board and harnessing the blind momentum of the ocean, suspended in air as though by some miracle of Newtonian dynamics. It seemed a liquid mystery and yet he felt he should be unsurprised; it was, after all, classical dynamics. The gang from around the pump house was out in full force, riding their boards as they awaited the perfect oncoming toppling ton of water, brown bodies deft on the white boards. Gordon sweated through the remorseless routine of the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises, assuring himself that this was just as good as the obvious pleasure the surfers took in their splitting of the waves. The required situps and pushups done, he ran over the swaths of sand, puffing to himself and in a muzzy way trying to unscramble the events of the day. They refused his simple tug: the day would not break down into simple paradigm. He halted, gasping in the salt air, eyebrows dark and beaded with sweat.

Penny walked forward on her board, perched in the thick air, and waved to him. Behind her the ocean cupped itself upright and caught her board in a smooth hand, tilting it forward. She teetered, wobbled, arms fanned the air; she fell. The soapy chum engulfed her. The slick white board tumbled forward, end over end, driven by momentum's grasp. Penny's head appeared, hair plastered like a cap to her head, blinking, teeth white and bared. She laughed.

As they dressed he said, "What's for supper?"

"Whatever you want."

"Artichoke salad, then pheasant, then a brandy trifle."

"I hope you can make all that."

"Okay, what do you want?"

"I'm going out. I'm not hungry."

"Huh?" A dull dawning of surprise. He was hungry.

"I'm going to a meeting."

"What for?"

"A meeting. A rally, I guess."

"For what?" he persisted. "For Goldwater."

"What?"

"You may have heard of him. He's running for President."

"You're kidding." He stopped, foot in midair, halfway into his jockey shorts. Then, realizing how comical he must look, he stepped in and pulled them up.

"He's a simple-minded–"

"Babbitt?"

"No, Sinclair Lewis wouldn't have occurred to him. Just leave it at simple-minded."

"Ever read
The Conscience of a Conservative
? He has a lot of things to say in there."

"No, I didn't. But look, when you have Kennedy, with the test ban treaty and some really new ideas in foreign policy, the Alliance for Progress–"

"Plus the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, that pig-eyed little brother of his."

"Oh, come on. Goldwater is just a pawn of big business."

"He'll stand up to the communists."

Gordon sat down on their bed. "You don't believe that stuff, do you?"

Penny wrinkled her nose, a gesture Gordon knew meant her mind was set. "Who sent our men into South Vietnam? What about what happened to Cliff and Bernie?"

"If Goldwater gets in, there'll be a million Cliffs and Bernies over there."

"Goldwater will win over there, not just fool around."

"Penny, the thing to do over there is cut our losses. Why support a dictator like Diem?"

"All I know is, friends of mine are getting killed."

"And Big Barry will change all that."

"Sure. I think he's solid. He'll stop socialism in our country."

Gordon lay back on the bed, spouting a resigned whoosh of disbelief.

"Penny, I know you think I'm some sort of New York communist, but I fail to see— "

"I'm late already. Linda invited me to this cocktail party for Goldwater, and I'm going. You want to go?"

"Good God, no."

"Okay, I'm going."

"You're a literature student who's for Goldwater? Come on."

"I know I don't fit your stereotypes, but that's your problem, Gordon."

"Jeezus."

"I'll be back in a few hours." She combed back her hair and checked her pleated skirt and walked out of the bedroom, stiff and energetic. Gordon lay on the bed watching her leave, unable to tell whether she was serious or not. She slammed the front door so hard it rattled, and he decided that she was.

It was an unlikely match from the start. They had met at a wine and chips party in a beach cottage on Prospect Street, a hundred yards from the La Jolla Art Museum. (The-first time Gordon went to the Museum he hadn't noticed the sign and assumed it was simply another gallery, somewhat better than most; to call it and the Met both museums seemed a deliberate joke.) His first impression was of her assembled order: neat teeth; scrupulously clear skin; effortless hair. A contrast with the thin, conflicted women of New York he had seen, "encountered"–a favorite word, then–and finally been daunted by. Penny seemed luminous and open, capable of genuinely breezy talk, uncluttered with the delivered opinions of The
New York Times
or the latest graduate seminar on What Is Important. In a flowered cocktail dress with a square neckline, the straight lines mitigated by a curving string of pearls, her glowing tan emitted warm yellow radiations that seeped through him in the wan light, life from a distant star. He was well into a bottle of some rotgut red by that time and probably overestimated the magic of the occasion, but she did seem to loom in the shadowed babble of the room. In better lit circumstances they might not have hit it off. This time, though, she was quick and artful and unlike any woman he had ever met before. Her flat California vowels were a relief from the congested accents of the east, and her sentences rolled out with an easy perfection he found entrancing. Here was the real thing: a naturalness, a womanly fervor, a clarity of vision. And anyway, she had ample, athletic thighs that moved under the silky dress as though her whole body were constrained by the cloth, capable of joyful escape. He didn't know much about women–Columbia's notorious deficiency–and as he knocked back more wine and made more conversation he wondered at himself, at her, at what was happening. It was uncomfortably like a cherished fantasy. When they left together, climbed into a Volkswagen and stuttered away from the still-buzzing party, his breath quickened at the implications–which promptly came true. From there the times spent together, the restaurants mutually enjoyed, the records and books rediscovered, seemed inevitable. This was the canonical
It
. The one thing he had always known about women was that there had to be magic, and now here it was, unannounced, even rather shy. He seized it.

And now in the metaphorical morning after, she had friends named Cliff and parents in Oakland and a liking for Goldwater. All right, he thought, so the details were not perfect. But maybe, in a sense, that was part of the magic, too.

APRIL 15, 1963

Gordon had breakfast at Harry's Coffee Shop on Girard, trying to read over his lecture notes and invent some problems for a homework set. It was difficult to work. The clatter of dishes kept intruding and a tinny radio played Kingston Trio songs, which he disliked. The only recent item in pop music he could tolerate was "Dominique," an odd hit recorded by an angel-voiced Belgian nun. He was not in the mood for concentration on things academic, anyway.
The San Diego Union
writeup of Saul's PR blitz had been worse than he'd expected, sensational beyond the bounds of reason. Several people in the department had tut-tutted him about it.

He mulled this over as he drove up Torrey Pines, without reaching any conclusion. He was distracted by a weaving Cadillac with its headlights burning on high. The driver was the typical fortyish man wearing a porkpie hat and a dazed expression. Back in the late '50s, he remembered, the National Safety Council had made a big thing of that. On one of the national holidays they publicized the practice of driving with headlights on during the day, to remind everyone to drive safely. Somehow the idea caught on with the slow-is-safe drivers and now, years later, you would still see them meandering through traffic, certain that their slowness bestowed invulnerability, lights burning uselessly. There was something about such reflex stupidity that never failed to irritate him.

Cooper was in the lab already. Showing more industry as his candidacy exam approaches, Gordon thought, but then felt guilty for being cynical.

Cooper did seem genuinely more interested now, quite possibly because the whole message riddle had been elevated out of his thesis.

"Trying out the new samples?" Gordon asked with a friendliness fueled by the residue of guilt.

"Yeah. Getting nice stuff. Looks to me like the added indium impurities did the trick."

Gordon nodded. He had been developing a method of doping the samples to achieve the right concentration of impurities and this was the first confirmation that several months of effort were going to pan out. "No messages?"

"No messages," Cooper said with obvious relief.

A voice from the doorway began, "Say, uh, I was told..."

"Yes?" Gordon said, turning. The man was dressed in droopy slacks and an Eisenhower jacket. He looked to be over fifty and his face was deeply tanned, as though he worked out of doors.

"You Perfesser Bernstein?"

"Yes." Gordon was tempted to add one of his father's old jokes, "Yes, I have that honor," but the man's earnest expression told him it wouldn't go over.

"I, I'm Jacob Edwards, from San Diego? I've done some work I think you might be interested in?" He turned every sentence into a question.

"What kind of work?"

"Well, your experiments and the message and all? Say, is this where you get the signals?"

"Ah, yes."

Edwards ambled into the laboratory, touching some of the equipment wonderingly. "Impressive. Real impressive." He studied some of the new samples laid out on the working counter.

"Hey," Cooper said, looking up from the x-y recorder. "Hey, those samples are coated with–shit!"

"Oh, that's okay, my hands were dirty anyway. You fellas got a lot of fine equipment in here? How you pay for it all?"

"We have a grant from–but look, Mr. Edwards, what can I do for you?"

"Well, I solved your problem, you know? I have, yeah." Edwards ignored Cooper's glare.

"How, Mr. Edwards?"

"The secret," he said, looking secretive, "is magnetism."