Timescape (50 page)

"Yeah. Look–" One of them began to write rapidly on Gordon's blackboard, covering up some notes Gordon had put there while he was outlining his paper. Gordon tried to follow the argument the twin was making. "Careful of that stuff I have written there." The twin frowned at Gordon's intruding lines.

"Okay?" he said democratically, and began to write around them.

Gordon focused his attention on the rapid-fire sentences about Bessel's functions and boundary conditions on the electric field. It took him five minutes to straighten out the twin's misconception. All through it he was never sure which one of the twins he was talking to. They were virtually carbon copies. As soon as one finished the other would leap to the attack with a new objection, usually phrased in a cryptic few words. Gordon found them exceptionally tiring. After ten more minutes, during which they began to interrogate him about his research and how much money a research assistant made, he finally got rid of them by pleading a headache.

That, plus three significant glances at his watch, got them out the door. As he was closing it, another voice called, "Wait a sec! Dr. Bernstein!"

Gordon reluctantly opened it. The man from UPI stepped partway in. "I know you don't want to be bothered, Professor–"

"Right. So why are you bothering me?"

"Because Professor Ramsey blew the story to me, just now. That's why."

"What story?"

"About you and those chain molecules. Where you got the picture in the first place. How you wanted it kept secret. I've got it all, the works." The man beamed at him.

"Why did Ramsey tell you?"

"I worked out some of it. He didn't paper over the seams in his story very well. Not a very good liar, Ramsey."

"I suppose not."

"He wasn't going to tell me anything. But I remembered that thing you were involved in a while back."

Gordon said with sudden fatigue, "Saul Shriffer."

"Yeah, he's the guy. Me, I put two and two together. I went to see Ramsey for some more back-grounding and in the middle of it I popped him with that one."

"And he babbled like a brook."

"You got it."

Gordon sagged into his chair. He sat there, slumped. down, staring at the man from United Press International.

"Well?" the man said. He took out a notebook. "You going to tell me, Professor?"

"I don't appreciate being grilled."

"Sorry if I offended you, Professor. I'm not grilling you. I just did a little sniffing around and–"

"Okay, okay, I'm sensitive about that."

"It's going to come out sometime, you know. The Ramsey-Hussinger thing hasn't got any real attention in the papers so far, I know. But it's going to be important. People are going to hear about it. Your part could be valuable."

In a dreamy way Gordon began to laugh softly.

"Could be valuable." he said, and laughed again.

The man frowned. "Hey, look, you are going to tell me, aren't you?"

Gordon felt an odd, seeping tiredness in himself. He sighed.. "I ... I suppose I am."

Gordon had not realized the lights would be so bright. There were banks of lamps to both sides of the small platform, to make his face shadow-free.

A TV camera snout peered at him, an unwinking Cyclops. There were some chemists in the audience, and nearly all the Physics Department.

The department draftsman had labored until midnight to get all the charts drawn. Gordon had found the staff a great help in hustling things together for this. He was beginning to realize that the hostility he had felt from them all was an illusion, a product of his own doubts. The last few days had been a revelation. Department members hailed him in the hall listened intently to his descriptions of his data, and visited the lab.

He looked around for Penny. There–near the back, in a pink dress. She smiled wanly at his hand wave. The press men were murmuring to each other and finding seats. The TV crewmen were in place and a woman with a microphone gave last-minute instructions. Gordon counted the crowd.

Incredibly, it was larger than the number who turned out for Maria Mayer's Nobel conference. But then, this one had a day or two of lead time. The UPI man got his exclusive story–picked up by the other wire services and then the University had stepped in and set up this dog and pony show.

Gordon riffled through his notes with damp fingers. He had not really wanted any of this. The feel of it seemed somehow wrong to him–science carried on in public, science elbowing for time on the 6 o'clock news, science as a commodity. The momentum of it was immense. In the end there would remain the article in Science, where his results had to meet their tests, where no amount of bias for or against him could tip the scales–

"Dr. Bernstein? We're ready."

He wiped his brow one last time. "Okay, shoot." A green light winked on.

He looked into the camera and tried to smile.

Peterson pulled the car into the brick garage and hauled out the suitcases. Puffing, he set them outside, on the path to the farmhouse. The garage doors locked with a reassuring clank. A biting wind was blowing off the North Sea, sweeping cleanly across the flat East Anglian landscape.

He pulled up the collar of his sheepskin jacket.

No sign of movement from the house. Probably no one had heard the car's quiet purr. He decided to take a walk round, to survey and stretch his legs. His head buzzed. He needed the air. He had stayed in a Cambridge hotel overnight, when the sudden sinking feeling came over him again. He slept through most of the morning, and came down expecting lunch. The hotel was deserted. So were the streets outside. There were signs of life in the houses nearby, chimney smoke and an orange glow of lamps. Peterson did not stop to inquire. He drove out of a bleak and empty Cambridge and up through the flat, somber fen country.

He rubbed his hands together, more in satisfaction than to keep them warm. For a while there, when the illness first struck him again outside London, he had thought he would never make it this far. The roads had been clogged on the way from London, and then, next day, north of Cambridge, strangely empty. He had seen overturned lorries and burning barns north of Bury St. Edmunds. By Stowmarket a gang tried to hail him down. They had axes and hoes. He had ploughed straight through them, sending bodies into the air like bowling pins.

But here the farm lay quiet beneath the rolling gray clouds of East Anglia. Ranks of leafless trees marked the field boundaries. Black blobs hung in the latticework of bare twigs, rooks' nests framed against the sky.

He tramped through the western field, legs weak, the black mud sticking to his boots. To his right, cows stood patiently by a gate, their breath steaming in the air, waiting to be led home to their shed. The harvest had been cut two weeks ago–he'd ordered that. The fields stood wide and empty now. Let them lie; there was time.

He circled round through the sugar beet acres to the old stone house. It looked deceptively run down. The only visible new note was a glass conservatory jutting to the south. The panes had cross-hatchings of wire imbedded, quite secure. Years ago, when he'd first begun, he'd decided on a system totally buried, completely isolated. The greenhouse had filtered water and fertilizers. Water tanks under the northern field held a year's supply. The greenhouse could produce a reasonable supply of vegetables for a long time. That, and the stores buried under the house and barn, would provide ample backup.

He had hired it done, of course, using laborers from distant towns. He'd had the vast coal bin filled from Cambridge, rather than nearby Dereham.

The mines in the fields and along the one road–capable of being armed either on command or by the detection system–he'd had a mercenary install. Peterson had arranged that the man be hired on some Pacific operation soon after, and he had not returned. The electronic watchdogs that dotted the farm he had brought in from California and hired a technical type from London to do up. Thus no one person knew the extent of the operation.

Only his uncle knew it all, and he was the grimly silent sort. Bloody boring company, though. For a moment he regretted not bringing Sarah.

But she would be the high-strung type out here, unable to bear the sameness of the long days. Of all the women he'd had in the past year, Marjorie Renfrew was the one most likely to fit in. She knew something ot farming and had turned out to be unexpectedly lusty. She had seen the need in him when he stumbled in last night and had met it with an instinctive passion. Beyond that, though, he couldn't imagine living with her for even a week. She would talk and bustle about, fretting, alternately criticizing and mothering him.

No, the only companions he could imagine for what lay ahead were men. He thought of Greg Markham. There was someone you could have trusted not to trip and shoot you in the back in a deer hunt or run away from an adder. Intelligent conversation and companionable silence.

Judgment and a certain perspective.

Still, it was going to be difficult without a woman. He probably should have spent more time on marriage, not dwelled in Sarah's butterfly crowd.

No matter how the world struggled out of the present muck, with hard times attitudes would change. There would be no more of what the social science lot called "free sexuality," which to Peterson was simply getting what he'd always thought the world owed anybody. Women, Women of all kinds and shapes and flavors. As people they varied, of course, but as tickets to a side of life beyond the brittle intellect, they were remarkably alike, sisters sharing the same magic. He had tried to understand his own attitude in terms of psychological theory, but had come away convinced the simple flat fact of living went beyond those categories. No convenient ideas worked. It wasn't ego-enforcing or disguised aggression. It wasn't a clever cover for some imagined homosexuality–he'd had a taste of that when young and found it thin gruel indeed, thanks. It was something beyond the analytical chat level. Women were part of that world-swallowing he had always sought, a way of keeping oneself sensual but not stupefied by glut.

So in the last year he had tried them all, pursued every possibility. He had known for a long while that something was coming. The fragile pyramid with him near the top would crumble. He had enjoyed what would soon pass, women and all the rest, and now felt no regrets. When you sail on the Titanic, there's no point in going steerage.

He wondered, idly, how many of the futurologists had got out. Few, he would guess. Their ethereal scenarios seldom talked about individual responses. They had looked away uncomfortably on that northern African field trip. The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.

He approached the stone house, noting with approval how ordinary and even shabby it looked.

"You're back, me'lord!"

Peterson whirled. A man approached, pushing a bicycle. A man from the village, he noted quickly. Work trousers, faded jacket, high boots. "Yes, I've come home for good."

"Ar, good it is. Safe 'arbor in these days, eh? I've brought yor bacon an'

dried beef, I 'as."

"Oh. Very good." Peterson accepted the cartons. "You'll just put them on the account, then?" He kept his voice as matter-of-fact as he could.

"Well, I was meanin' to speak to the house"–he nodded, pointing at the farmhouse "'bout that."

"You can deal with me."

"Right. Well, as things is happenin', I'd appreciate payment on the day, y'see."

"Well, I see no reason why not. Sure."

"And I'd like payment in goods, if you please."

"Goods?"

"Money's no good now, is it? Some of yor vegetables, p'haps? Tinned goods is what we'd truly like."

"Oh." Peterson tried to judge the man, who was giving him a fixed smile, one that had other interpretations than simple friendliness. "I suppose we can do a bit of that, yes. We don't have many tinned goods, however."

"We'd like 'em, though, sir."

Was there an edge to his voice? "I'll see what we can do."

"That'd be fine, sir." The man sketched a brief gesture of touching a forelock, as though he were a retainer and Peterson the squire. Peterson stood still as the man swung onto his bicycle and pedaled off. There had been enough of parody in the gesture to give the entire conversation a different cast. He watched the man leave the property without looking back. Frowning, he turned towards the house.

He went round behind the hedge, avoiding the garden, and crossed the farmyard. From the henhouse came low contented cluckings. By the door he scraped his boots on the old iron scraper and then tossed them down in the passageway just inside the door He slipped on some house shoes and hung up his jacket.

The large kitchen was warm and bright. He had put in modern appliances but left the flagged stone floor, worn smooth by centuries of use, and the huge fireplace and the old oak settle. His uncle and aunt sat on either side of the fire in comfortable high-backed wing chairs, as silent and motionless as iron firedogs. In its place at the head of the table, the big round teapot sat under its quilted cosy. Roland, the farmhouse factotum, silently set the plate of scones, pats of sweet butter, and a dish of homemade strawberry jam on-the table.

He crossed to the fire to warm his hands. His aunt, seeing him, gave a start.

"Well, bless my soul, it's Ian!"

She leaned forward and tapped her husband on the knee.

"Henry! Look who's here. It's Ian, come to see us. Isn't that nice?"

"He's come to live with us; Dot," his uncle answered patiently.

"Oh?" she said, puzzling. "Oh. Where's that pretty gel of yours then, Ian? Where's Angela?"

"Sarah," he corrected automatically. "She stayed in London."

"Hmm. Pretty gel but flighty. Well, let's have tea."

She threw back the rug from her legs.

Roland came forward and lifted her to her seat by the teapot. They all sat round the table. Roland was a big man, slow-moving. He had been with the family two decades.

"Look, Roland, here's Ian, come to visit." Peterson sighed. His aunt had been senile for years; only her husband and Roland had any continuity in her mind.