Timescape (37 page)

Maybe it would all go away. Maybe it would be forgotten.

When Penny went board surfing at Scripps Beach, Gordon sat on the sand and watched. He had been doing a lot of that recently–sitting, thinking, letting others play out the summer. He liked running on the beach and knew he should try riding the waves, now that he had someone to teach him, but something held him back. He watched the La Jolla ladies work on their expensive tans, and came to know the types: People who worked outdoors were pale behind the knees, whereas beach loungers were a uniform chocolate, a consummation carefully arrived at.

Penny came out of the tumbling waters, board perched on a hip, straggly hair dripping. She sagged down beside him, wrung out her hair, flicked a glance at his set expression. "Okay," she said finally, "time to 'fess up."

"Fess who?"

"Fess Parker. Gordon, come on. You're doing your zombie imitation."

Gordon had always prided himself on getting right to the point; now he found himself rummaging for something to say. "Y'know ... I've been looking through the journals in the library. Astronomy journals, I mean.

Mercury, Scientific American, Science News
. Most of them are flat out ignoring Saul's PR work. Even if they mention it, they don't reproduce the picture. And not a one gave the Hercules coordinates."

"Publish them yourself."

Gordon shook his head. "Won't do any good."

"When did you start feeling so inadequate?"

"At ten," Gordon said, hoping for some way to deflect this conversation,

"when I began to suspect I wasn't Mozart. I was that American myth, the 98-pound weakling. Those Charles Atlas ads, remember. When I went to the beach, bullies didn't kick sand in my face they'd kick me in the face.

Eliminate the middle man."

"Uh huh." She studied him, face compressed. "You know that was the first thing you've told me about the Saul business in, what, a month?"

He shrugged.

"You never tell me anything anymore."

"I don't want to get you so involved that people will ask you about it. So you'll have to defend me to friends." He paused. "Or deal with cranks."

"Gordon, I'd rather know what's going on. Really. If I'm to talk to UCLJ

people I can't very well gloss over it."

He shrugged again. "Big deal. I might be leaving UCLA anyway."

"What?"

So he told her about not getting the Merit Increase.

"Look," he concluded, "being appointed an Assistant Professor is always risky. You may have to move on if things don't work out. I outlined all that to you. We talked it over."

"Well, sure, eventually ..." She stared off toward La Jolla Point, face blank. "I mean, in the long run, if you didn't publish ..."

"I've published," he murmured in a half-breath, defensively.

"Then why?"

"The business with Lakin. I can't do research in a group with two guys I like, Feher and Schultz, and one I rub the wrong way, Lakin. Personalities are— "

"I thought scientists rose above mere squabbling. You told me that once."

"This is more than a squabble, can't you see that?"

"Lakin is kind of out of the old school. Skeptical. Thinks I'm trying to deliberately make trouble for him." He ticked off motivations on his fingers. "Getting older and feeling a little shaky, maybe. Hell, I dunno. But I can't work in a group dominated by a guy like that. I've told you that before."

"Ah." Her voice had a brittle edge. "So, in effect, we talked that one out, too?"

"Oh, Christ."

"I'm glad you're conferring with me on all these problems. On your problems."

"Look–" he spread his hands, a wide gesture- "I don't know what I'll do.

I was just talking."

"It'll mean leaving La Jolla. Leaving California, where I lived all my life?

If that comes up, give me a few minutes to mull it over, okay?"

"Sure. Sure."

"You can still stay on here, though? It's your choice?"

"Yeah. We'll decide it together."

"Good. Fair and square? Open? No holding yourself aloof?"

"One man, one vote."

"That's what I'm afraid of."

"One person, one vote."

"Zappo."

Gordon lay down and opened a wrinkled
Time
magazine against the hovering sun. He tried to dismiss the boiling alternatives in his head and concentrate on a piece in the Science section on the planned Apollo moon shots. He made progress slowly; a decade of reading the close-packed language of physics had robbed him of speed. On the other hand, it did make him more conscious of style. He was gradually coming to feel that the breezy simplicities of
Time
hid more than they revealed. He was mulling this point when a shadow fell over him.

"Thought I recognized you," a gruff man's voice said.

Gordon blinked up into the hazy sunshine. It was Cliff, in a bathing suit and carrying a sixpack of beer. Gordon became very still. "I thought you lived in northern California."

"Hey! Cliffie!" Penny had rolled over and seen him. "Whacha doin'

here?" She sat up. Cliff squatted on the sand, eyeing Gordon. "Jest walkin'

along. My day off. Got a job in Oceanside."

"And you saw us here?" Penny said happily.

"How long have you been down this way? You should've called me."

"Yes," Gordon said dryly, "a remarkable coincidence."

"Little over a week. Got me a job in two days flat."

Cliff hunkered down, not sitting on the sand but resting with the beer in both hands between his legs and his buttocks only an inch from the beach.

Gordon remembered seeing Japanese perched like that for hours, in a movie somewhere. It was a curious pose, as though Cliff did not wish to commit himself to fully sitting with them. Penny burbled on, but Gordon was not listening. He studied Cliff's sun-baked ease and looked for something behind the eyes, something that explained this improbable coincidence. He did not believe it for an instant, of course. Cliff knew that Penny surfed and that this was the nearest good beach. The only interesting question was whether Penny had known this was going to happen as well. There was no sign between them, no small inexplicable smiles, no gestures, no false notes that Gordon could see. But that was just it–he wasn't good at that sort of thing. And as he watched them talking with their slow and easy grace they seemed so alike, so familiar from a thousand movies and cigarette ads, and so strange. Gordon sat, white as the under-belly of a fish in comparison, a flabby dirty alabaster with black swirls of hair. He felt a slow flush of emotion, a wash of feeling he could not quite name. He did not know if this was some elaborate, cute game they were playing, but if it was–

Gordon surged up, lurched to his feet. Penny watched him. Her lips parted in surprise at his stony expression. He struggled for the words, for something to fill the ground between knowledge and suspicion, something just right, and finally mumbled, "Don't, don't mind me."

"Hey, sport, I–"

"Goy games." Gordon waved a hand in dismissal, face hot. It had come out more bitter than he planned.

"Gordon, come on, really–" Penny began, but he turned away and broke into a trot: The rhythm picked him up instantly. He heard her voice, raised above the crunch of breakers, but it was thin and fading as she called to him. Okay, he thought, no Great Gatsby finish, but it got me out of that, that–

Not ending the sentence, not wanting to think about any of it any more, he ran toward the distant carved hills.

AUGUST 6, 1963

"I'm thinking of going into industry," he said to Penny one evening over supper. They had shared their small talk already, in what had become a thin ritual. Gordon refused to discuss the meeting on the beach, refused to have Cliff over for a drink, and felt his withdrawal would, ultimately, settle the matter. Only dimly did it occur to him that the refusals were the cause of the curiously stale conversations they now had together.

"What's that mean?"

"Work in a company research lab. GE, Bell Labs–" He launched into an advertisement for the virtues of working where results counted, where ideas evolved swiftly into hardware. He did not, in fact, believe the industrial labs were superior to university groups, but they did have an aura. Things got done faster there. Helpers and technicians abounded.

Salaries were higher. Then too, he enjoyed the unavoidable smugness of the scientist, who knew he could always have a life beyond academe. Not merely a job, but a pursuit. Genuine research, and for decent pay, too.

Maybe something beyond the laboratory, as well–look at Herb York with his consulting on "defense posture" and the cloudy theories of disarmament. The government could use some clear scientific thinking there, he argued.

"Gordon, this is just plain old bullshit."

"Huh?" It stalled him for a moment.

"You don't want to go work for a company."

"I'm thinking very seriously–"

"You want to be a professor. Do research. Have students. Give lectures.

You lap it up."

"I do?"

"Of course you do. When everything's going okay you get up humming in the morning and you're humming when you come home at night."

"You overestimate the pleasures of the job."

"I'm not estimating at all. I see what professoring does to you."

"Uh." His momentum blunted, he ruefully admitted to himself that she knew him pretty well.

"So instead of talking up some temporary escape hatch like industry, you ought to be doing something."

"Like what?"

"Something different. Move your x's and y's and z's around. Try–"

"Another approach," he finished for her.

"Exactly. Thinking about problems from a different angle is–" She broke off, hesitated, then plunged ahead. "Gordon, I could tell what was going on there with Cliff. I could reassure you and do a whole routine, but I'm not sure any more that you'd believe me."

"Remember this," she said firmly. "You don't own me, Gordon. We're not even married, for Chrissake."

"Is that what's bothering you?"

"Bothering me? God, it's you that's–"

" 'cause if it is, maybe we ought to talk about that and see if—"

"Gordon, wait. When we started out, moved in together, we agreed we were going to try it out, that's all."

"Sure. Sure." He nodded vigorously, his food forgtotten "But I'm willing, if it's making you play games like this thing wth Cliff–and that was really childish, Penny, arranging that meeting, just childish–I'm willing to talk about it, you know, ah, getting–"

Penny held out her hand, palm toward him. "No. Wait. Two points, Gordon." She ticked them off.

"One, I didn't arrange any meeting. Maybe Cliff was looking for us, but I didn't know about it. Hell, I didn't even know he was around here.

Two–Gordon, do you think our getting married will solve anything?"

"Well, I feel that–"

"Because I don't want to, Gordon. I don't want to marry you at all."

He came up out of the muggy press of late summer in the subway and emerged into the only slightly less compacted heat of 116th Street. This entrance and exit were relatively new. He dimly remembered an old cast-iron kiosk which, until the early '50s, ushered students into the rumbling depths. It stood between two swift lanes of traffic, providing a neat Darwinian selection pressure against undue mental concentration.

Here, students with their minds stuffed chock full of Einstein and Mendel and Hawthorne often had their trajectories abruptly altered by Hudsons and DeSotos and Fords.

Gordon walked along 116th Street, glancing at his watch. He had refused to give a seminar on this, his first return to his Alma Mater since receiving his doctorate; still, he did not want to be late for his appointment with Claudia Zinnes. She was a kindly woman who had barely escaped Warsaw as the Nazis were entering it, but he remembered her impatience with late students. He hurried by South Field. To his left students clustered on the shallow steps of Low Library. Gordon headed for the physics building, perspiring from the effort of carrying his big brown suitcase. Among a knot of students he thought he saw a familiar face.

"David! Hey, David!" he called. But the man turned away quickly and walked in the opposite direction. Gordon shrugged. Maybe Selig didn't want to see an old classmate; he always had been an odd bird.

Come to think of it, everything here now seemed a little bit odd, like a photograph of a friend with something retouched. In the yellow summer light the buildings looked a little more scruffy, the people wan and pale, the gutters slightly deeper in trash. A block away a drunk lounged on a doorstep, drinking from something in a brown paper bag. Gordon picked up his pace and hurried inside. Maybe he had been in California too long; everything that wasn't crisp and new struck him as used up.

Claudia Zinnes was unchanged. Behind her warm eyes lurked a glinting intelligence, distant and amused. Gordon spent the afternoon with her, describing his experiments, comparing his apparatus and techniques with her laboratory. She knew of spontaneous resonance and Saul Shriffer and the rest. She found it "interesting," she said, the standard word that committed you to nothing. When Gordon asked her to try to duplicate the experiment with Cooper, at first she brushed aside the idea. She was busy, there were many students, the time on the big nuclear resonance magnets was all booked up, there was no money. Gordon pointed out how similar one of her present setups was to his own; simple modifications would make it identical. She argued that she didn't have a sample of indium antimonide good enough. He produced five good samples, little slabs of gray: here, use them any way you want. She arched an eyebrow. He found himself slipping into a persona he had forgotten–pushy yid schoolboy, hustling the teacher for a better grade. Claudia Zinnes knew these routines as well as anybody living, but gradually his pressure piqued her interest.

Maybe there was something to the spontaneous resonance effect after all.

Who could tell, now that the waters around it had been muddied so? She gazed at him with the warm brown eyes and said, "It's not for that you want me to... But–a warning finger–let the curves speak for themselves.