Timescape (28 page)

"Oh."

"Our sun's magnetism, that's what they're after?"

"Who?" Gordon began to rummage through his mind for some way to get Edwards away from the equipment.

"The people who're sending you those letters? They're coming here to steal our magnetism. It's all that keeps the Earth going around the sun–that's what I've proved."

"Look, I don't think magnetism has anything to do–"

"Your experiment here," he patted the large field coils "uses magnets, doesn't it?"

Gordon saw no reason to deny that. Before he could say anything Edwards went on, "They were drawn to your magnetism, Perfesser Bernstein. They're exploring for more magnetism and now that they've found yours, they're gong to come and get it."

"I see."

"And they're going to take the sun's magnetism, too." He waved his hands and stared off at the ceiling, as though confronting a vision. "All of it. We'll fall into the sun."

"I don't think–"

"I can prove all this, you know," the man said calmly in an I'm-being-perfectly-reasonable tone. "I stand before you as the man who has cracked– cracked–the unified field riddle. You know? Where all the particles come from, and where these messages come from? I've done it?"

"Jee-zus," Cooper said sourly.

Edwards turned on him. "Whacha mean by that, boy?"

Cooper shot back, "Tell me, are they coming in flying saucers?"

Edwards' face clouded. "Who tole you that?"

"Just a guess," Cooper said mildly.

"You got somethin' you're not tellin' the newspapers?"

"No," Gordon cut in. "No, we don't."

Edwards poked a finger at Cooper. "Then why'd he say–Ah!" He froze, looking at Cooper. "You're not gonna tell the newspapers, are you?"

"There is nothing–"

"Not gonna tell about the magnetism at all, are you?"

"We don't–"

"Well, you're not keeping it for yourself! The unified magnetism theory is mine and you, you educated–" he struggled for the word he wanted, gave up and went on– "In your universities, aren't gonna keep me from–"

"There is no–"

"–from goin' to the newspapers and tellin' my side of it. I've had some education, too, y'know, an'–"

"Where did you study?" Cooper said sarcastically. "The Close Cover Before Striking Institute?"

"You–" Edwards seemed suddenly congested with words, so many words he could not get them out one at a time. "You–"

Cooper stood up casually, looking muscular and on guard. "Come on, fella. Move it."

"What?"

"Out."

"You can't have my ideas!"

"We don't want them," Gordon said.

"Wait'll you see it in the newspapers. Just you wait."

"Out." Cooper said.

"You won't get a peep at my magnetism motor, either. I was going to show you–"

Gordon put his hands on his hips and walked toward the man, boxing him in with Cooper on one side and the only escape leading to the laboratory doorway. Edwards backed away, still talking. He glared at them and struggled for a last phrase to hurl, but his imagination failed him.

Edwards turned, grumbling, and shouldered his way into the corridor outside.

Gordon and Cooper looked at each other. "One of the laws of nature,"

Gordon said, "is that half the people have got to be below average."

"For a Gaussian distribution, yeah," Cooper said. "Sad, though." He shook his head and smiled. Then he went back to work.

Edwards was the first, but not the last. They turned up at a steady rate, once the
San Diego Union
story was picked up by other newspapers. Some drove in from Fresno and Eugene, intent on unraveling the riddle of the messages, each sure he knew the answer before he saw the evidence. Some brought manuscripts they had written on their ideas about the universe, in general, or a particular scientific theory–Einstein was a favorite, and refuting him the common theme–or, occasionally, on Gordon's experiments. The notion of writing a supposedly learned treatise, using only a vague newspaper article as the sole source, bemused Gordon. Some of the visitors had even published their theses, using the private presses beloved of amateurs. They would present them to him, lovingly handing over bound bundles with lurid covers. Inside, a jumble of terms elbowed each other for room in sentences that led nowhere. Equations appeared by sleight of hand, festooned with new symbols like fresh Christmas tree decorations. The theories, when Gordon took the time to listen, would begin and end in midair; they had no connection with anything else known in physics, and always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable. Most of the cranks seemed to think constructing a new theory involved only the invention of new terms. Along with "energy,"

"field," "neutrino," and other common terms would appear "macron,"

"superon," and "fluxforce"–all undefined, all surrounded with the magic aura of the Believer.

Gordon came to recognize them easily. They would come to his office or laboratory, or call him at home, and within a minute he could tell them from ordinary folk. The cranks always had certain buzz words that appeared early on. They would claim to have solved everything–to have wrapped up all known problems in one grand synthesis. "Unified theory"

was a dead giveaway. Another was the sudden, unexplained appearance of the Believer. Words such as "superon." At first Gordon would laugh when this happened, joshing the crank with a casual manner, sometimes making a joke. But a third hallmark of the crank was his humorlessness.

They never laughed, never backed down from their ramparts. Indeed, open display of ridicule would bring out the worst in them. They were uniformly sure that every working scientist was out to steal their ideas. Several warned him that they had already applied for a patent. (The fact that you can patent an invention but not an idea had passed them by.) At this point Gordon would try to contrive a graceful exit from the conversation; on the telephone this was easy; he just hung up. Cranks in person were not so simple. Resistance to their groundbreaking ideas inevitably led to open threats that they would–here there came the grim look, the reluctant derision that they must use the final, ultimate weapon–go immediately to the newspapers. Somehow, to them, the press was always the judge of things scientific. Since Gordon had been elevated to their attention by the
San Diego Union
, he would of course fear deeply any attack on his position in the same hallowed pages.

Finally, Gordon developed defenses. On the telephone he was quick to hang up–so quick that he cut off his own mother once, when he did not recognize her voice and could not make out anything intelligible over the transcontinental static. Crank manuscripts and letters were equally easy.

He wrote a note saying that while the person's ideas were "interesting" (a suitably non-judgmental term), they were beyond his competence; so he was unable to comment on them. This worked; they never replied.

On-the-spot cranks were the worst. He learned to be abrupt, even rude.

This got rid of most of them. The harder, persistent sort–such as Edwards–Gordon learned to derail, to gently deflect onto other matters.

Then he would edge them toward the door, murmuring reassuring phrases–but never a promise to read a manuscript, attend a lecture, or vouch for a theory. That way lay further involvement and more wasted time. He would edge them toward the door and they would go grudgingly, sometimes, but they would go,

A side effect of this crank traffic came to light in casual remarks from other members of the department. They noted the cranks with interest at first. Amusement followed, and Gordon provided them with anecdotes of strange theories and even stranger behavior. But in time the mood changed. Other faculty disliked having the department known for its garbled image in the
San Diego Union
. They stopped asking him, at the afternoon coffee break, what new crank had come by. Gordon noticed the change.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN,

MAY 24, 1963

The San Diego area was growing and spreading. Rather than pattern itself on the jumble of Los Angeles, the younger city to the south chose to encourage white-collar employers, "clean" industries, and think tanks. The largest such tank in the area was General Atomic, scarcely a mile from the fledgling University. Quite considerable fish were to be seen swimming in its waters, puzzling at government-sponsored problems. Noted names from Berkeley and Caltech spent pleasant months scribbling on blackboards while outside, the General Atomic squirrels and rabbits lazily foraged for their handouts. The animals were part of a psychologist's deliberate plan to evoke rest, quiet, and deep thought; the resemblance to a Disney film may have been accidental. The architect's remorselessly circular motif for the central General Atomic offices, with the eagerly cooperative library at its center, had a similar aim. The ringed roads and buildings recalled Oriental notions of completeness, of serenity, of rest.

The curved hallways would increase contact between researchers. In fact, though, the inescapable geometry meant that no one could see further than thirty feet along the curving corridors. This tended to prevent the accidental meetings as scientists came and went; they passed out of view before they could be noticed. To go home or to the library meant moving radially, and thus seeing nobody. As Freeman Dyson said that summer,

"The mean interaction distance around here is no bigger than a soccer goal." Yet often it was enough; these were exciting tunes. Only six months before, Mariner II had surveyed Venus close up for the first time.

Gell-Mann and others were plumbing new depths in particle theory. In April, J. Robert Oppenheimer was named winner of the Atomic Energy Commission's 1963 Fermi award. Oppenheimer had been, in the eyes of many scientists, the public whipping boy of the McCarthy era; he had been declared a security risk in 1954. Now at last the government seemed to be serving some penance for its stupidity. Hard feelings against Edward Teller, who had not spoken out strongly for Oppenheimer, in turn began to wane.

The feeling of opening, of fresh starts, was on the political scene already a clich. The Kennedy ambience was a canon of media hype. Vaughn Meader's "The First Family" album, which mocked the Kennedy clan, sold briskly; the public sensed that the derision was all in good fun. Scientists were a more skeptical lot, however, mostly liberal or radical, and bothered by Bobby Kennedy's generally perceived ruthlessness and neglect of the legal niceties of wiretapping. But the rise of support for scientific research was now coming to seem like a permanent feature, beginning with a sudden rush after Sputnik and rushing linearly. Everyone knew it would plateau out, but not soon; there was much to be done, and few to do it.

Freeman Dyson came to California on leave from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, to work on the Orion project. Dyson had an immense reputation as a theoretical physicist and thus was invited to give one of the last spring Colloquia in the UCLJ Physics Department. Gordon was pleased. He was to give the very last Colloquium of the year, and to have Dyson speak beforehand about some speculative ideas might defuse some of the reaction to Gordon.

Dyson was slim and humorous, moving gracefully before the blackboard as though in a light trance, thinking hard about what he wanted to say and bending each sentence to strike a precise point. He had been very careful earlier to correct George Feher when he was referred to as

"Doctor." Dyson had never finished his doctorate and now seemed slightly proud of it, with the Englishman's pride at being, at least in the formal sense, an amateur. But there was nothing amateurish about Dyson's Colloquium. His slides were neat, with clear graphics, some in color. They had the professional aerospace finish that to Gordon underhned the pleasant perks of prosperity; in his undergraduate days at Columbia, rough sketches and hand-lettered slides were universal.

Dyson described his years of work on Project Orion, a plan to propel huge spacecraft by exploding nuclear bombs behind them. The blast would strike a "pusher plate," which would transfer the muted kick through shock absorbers to the ship itself. The idea at first seemed like a Rube Goldberg design, but as Dyson spoke it became plausible. The only way to ferry truly large payloads around the solar system was through nuclear drives of some kind. Orion was bhsically simple and used what we were already good at: making efficient bombs. Why not use man's destructive capability for something useful? Dyson thought that a strong effort would not simply put men on the moon by 1970–Kennedy's goal–but beyond, all the way to Mars. The principles involved had been tried in small-scale experiments and they worked. The problem, of course, was the first stage: lifting the craft from the earth's surface on a stuttering trail of nuclear blasts.

"Won't you plaster us with radioactive debris?" a voice from the Colloquium audience called. Dyson pursed his lips. He was a compact man and his sharp features seemed to pin the problem like a butterfly. "Much less so than the atmospheric tests we and the Soviet Union are now conducting. We calculate Orion would add no more than one percent to the level of radiation that politics–" he pronounced the word carefully–

"already sets for us."

At this point Dyson became wistful, as though he could sense Orion slipping from him. The newspapers brought daily reports of agreements on the Nuclear Test Ban; Washington rumor said it would be signed within months. If so, even Orion's small close of radioactives would be ruled out. Toward the end of the hour, after the equations and graphs, there came a bittersweet quality. History would pass Orion by. It might someday fly above the atmosphere, once men had a safe way to get it into orbit with chemical rockets. But even then, much of the debris would eventually find its way down into the air. Maybe there was no completely safe way to harness our gift for making bombs. Maybe there were no shortcuts to the planets. The applause which greeted Dyson's somber conclusion was prolonged. He bowed tentatively toward his audience, smiling with sad eyes.

Gordon gave the last Colloquium of the year. The audience was even larger than Dyson's of the week before, and noisier. Gordon opened with details of the experiment, history of the field, slides of the normal resonance lines. He had compiled all Cooper's conventional results to date, and showed how these confirmed the usual theory. It was a satisfactory but relatively unexciting discussion. Gordon had considered leaving matters at that–no reference to the messages, no risks. But something made him cut short the parade of slides. He murmured, "However, there are some unusual features in the noise observed in our work"–and he was off, describing the interruptions of Cooper's resonance curves, their suspicion that a pattern lay underneath, then the first decoding. Gordon used the viewgraph projector, sliding the transparent sheets into view as he spoke, his sentences coming quicker now, the words more clipped, a certain momentum coming into his voice. He showed the breakdown of the first message. He discussed the chances that such a message could be a fluke, an accident. From the crowded room there arose a sustained murmur. He described their efforts to track down a local source for the noise, their failure, and then the second message. Gordon made no mention of Saul and the 29-by-53 grid; he simply displayed the data. The RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2 chart filled an entire viewgraph. Only then did Gordon mention "spontaneous resonance," giving Isaac Lakin full credit for the term and the idea. He kept his face blank and his voice flat and calm as he described "spontaneous resonance," gave the statistical probability of such an effect arising from random noise, and left the rows of RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2 on the viewgraph as mute testimony. In dry, precise tones he told of their precautions against outside signals, of the waxing and waning of the "spontaneous resonance"–now he used the term archly, pausing before and after the words as if to put verbal quotation marks around them, smiling very slightly–and he paced back and forth before the blackboards, trying to remember the measured way Dyson had done it, head tilted down.