Timescape (53 page)

He shook his head. All form and structure was eroded by the overlapping of many voices, a chorus. Everyone was talking at once and no one could hear. The roughing pumps coughed. Tachyons of size 10-3 centimeters were flashing across whole universes, across 1028 centimeters of cooling matter, in less time than Renfrew's eye took to absorb a photon of the pale laboratory light. All distances and times were wound in upon each other, singularities sucking up the stuff of creation. Event horizons rippled and worlds coiled into worlds. There were Voices in this room, voices clamoring, touching. Renfrew stood up and suddenly clutched at a scope mount for support. Christ, the fever. It clawed at him, ran glowing smoke fingers through his mind. ATTEMPT CONTACT FROM 2349. All thought of reaching the past was gone now, he realized, blinking. The room veered, then righted itself. With Markham gone and the Wickham woman missing for days, there was no longer even any hope of understanding what had happened. Causality's leaden hand would win out. The soothing human world of flowing time would go on, a Sphinx yielding none of her secrets. An infinite series of grandfathers would live out their lives safe from Renfrew. ATTEMPT CONTACT, the scope sputtered again.

But unless he knew where and When they were, there was no hope of answering.

Hello, 2349. Hello out there. This is 1998, an x and t in your memory.

Hello. ATTEMPT CONTACT.

Renfrew smiled with flinty irony. Whispers came flitting, embedding soft words of tomorrow in the indium. Someone was there. Someone brought hope.

The room was cold. Renfrew huddled by his instruments, perspiring, peering at the bursts of waves. He was like a South Sea islander, watching the airplanes draw their stately lines across the sky, unable to shout up to them. I am here. Hello, 2349. Hello.

He was trying a modification of the signal correlator when the lights winked out. Utter blackness rushed in. The distant generator rattled and chugged into silence.

It took a long time to feel his way out and into the light. It was a bleak, gray noon, but he did not notice; it was enough to be outside.

He could hear no sound from Cambridge at all. The breeze carried a sour tang. No birds. No aircraft.

He walked south, towards Grantchester. He looked back once at the low square profile of the Cav and in the diffused light he raised a hand to it.

He thought of the nested universes, onion skin within onion skin. Leaning back, head swimming, he peered at the clouds, once so benign a sight.

Above that cloak was the galaxy, a great swarm of colored lights, turning with majestic slowness in the great night. Then he looked down at the bumpy, worn footpath and felt a great weight lift from him. For so long now he had been transfixed by the past. It had deadened him to this real world around him. He knew, now, without knowing quite how he knew, that it was forever lost. Rather than feeling despair, he was elated, free.

Marjorie lay up ahead, no doubt frightened to be alone. He remembered her preserves on the uncompromising straight shelving, and smiled. They could eat those for some time. Have some easy meals together, as they did in the days before the children. They would soon have to go to the countryside and get Johnny and Nicky, of course.

Puffing slightly, his head clearing, he walked along the deserted path.

There was really quite a lot ahead to do, when you thought about it.

OCTOBER 28, 1974

He walked from his hotel on Connecticut Avenue. The reception was to be a buffet lunch, the letter said, so Gordon had slept in until eleven. He had long ago learned that on short trips to the east it was best to grant nothing to the myth of time zones, and keep to his western schedule.

Invariably this fit the demands on an out-of-town visitor anyway, since such occasions were excuses for lingering over sauce-drenched entrees in expensive restaurants, followed by earnest,

now-that-we're-away-from-the-office-I-can-speak-frankly revelations over several cups of coffee, and then late night stumblings-to-bed. Arising at ten the next morning seldom got him to the NSF or AEC later than the executives themselves, since he ate no breakfast.

He tramped through the city zoo; it was more or less along the way.

Yellow canine eyes followed him, contemplating the results if the bars were suddenly lifted. Chimps swung in pendulum strokeson an un ending circuit of their cramped universe. The natural world was a pocket here amid distant honks and looming, square profiles of sour brown brick.

Gordon savored the clammy fullness of the breeze that had tunneled its way up from the Potomac. He welcomed this traveler's brush with the seasons, punctuations to the extended sentences of the months, a welcome relief from California's monotonous excellence. He had first come here with his mother and father. That tourist's orbit was now a dim set of memories from a corner of his preadolescence, the period of life that he supposed was everybody's golden age. He remembered being awed at the sleek white glow of the Washington Monument and the White House. For years afterward he was certain these solemn edifices were what was meant when his grammar school class sang "America" and chorused about alabaster majesties. "The country, it really begins in Washington," his mother had said, not forgetting to add the pedagogical "D.C.," so that her son would never confuse it with the state. And Gordon, towed through the list of historic shrines, saw what she meant. Beyond the Frenchified design of the city center lay a rural park, land that breathed of Jefferson and tree-traced boulevards. To him Washington had ever since been the entranceway to a vast republic where crops sprouted under a WASP sun.

There, blue-eyed blonds drove yellow roadsters that left dust plumes on the open roads as they roared from one country fair to the next, women won prizes for strawberry preserves and men drank watery beer and kissed girls who had been struck from the template of Doris Day. He had gazed upward at the Spirit of St. Louis hanging like a paralyzed moth in the Smithsonian, and wondered how a cornhusker city–"without a single good college in it," his mother sniffed–could flap wings and scoot aloft.

Gordon thrust his hands into his pockets for warmth and walked. The corners of his mouth perked up in an airy mirth. He had learned a lot about the huge country beyond Washington, most of it from Penny. Their mutual abrasions had healed over in the aftermath of 1963 and they had found again the persistent chemistry that had first drawn them into their mutual bound orbits, circles centered on a point midway between them.

The thing between them was not a geometric dot but rather a small sun, igniting between them a passion Gordon felt was deeper than anything that had happened to him before. They were married in late 1964. Her father, just plain Jack, put on a massive wedding, glittery and champagne-steeped. Penny wore the traditional white. She made a downward-turning leer whenever anyone mentioned it. She had come with him to Washington that winter, when he was making his first big presentation to the NSF for a major grant of his own. His talk went well and Penny fell in love with the National Gallery, going every day to see the Vermeers. Together they ate shellfish with luminaries from the NSF and strolled down from the Congressional dome to the Lincoln Monument.

They did not mind the raw, cold damp then; it went with the scenery.

Everything had seemed to go with everything else. Gordon checked the address and found that he had another block to go. He had always been intrigued by the contrasts of Washington. This busy street brimmed with its own importance, yet intersecting it were thinner avenues of small shops, decaying houses, and corner grocery stores. Old black men leaned in doorways, their large brown eyes surveying the tax-funded bustle.

Gordon waved to one and, turning a corner, discovered a mammoth courtyard. It had the austere French style of 1950s Government Classical, with conical evergreens standing like sentries at the abrupt, uncompromising comers. Regimented bushes led the eye, willing or not, into remorseless perspectives. Well, he thought, blocky and self-important architecture or no, this was it. He teetered back on his heels to look.

Granite facings led upward into a bland sky. He took his hands out of his pockets and brushed hair back from his eyes. Already there was the giveaway thinning of the crown, he knew, sure sign that his father's baldness would find echo in his own forties.

He pushed open a series of three glass doors. The spaces between seemed to serve as air locks, preserving inside a dry heat. Ahead were tables with luxuriant linen draped over them. In the center of the carpeted foyer, knots of suited men. Gordon pushed through the last air lock and into a hushed buzz of talk. Thick drapes swallowed sounds, giving the air a solemnity found in mortuaries. To the left, a band of receptionists. One detached herself and came toward him. She was wearing a long, cream-colored silky thing Gordon would have taken for an evening gown if it were not midday. She asked for his name. He gave it slowly. "Oh," she said, eyes round, and went to one of the draped tables. She returned with a name tag, not the usual plastic, but a sturdy wooden flame housing a stark white board with his name in calligraphy. She pinned it on him. "We do want our guests to look their best today," she said with abstract concern; and brushed imaginary lint from his coat sleeve. Gordon warmed at the attention and forgave her efficient gloss. Other men, all suited, most in basic bureaucratic black, were filling the foyer. The receptionists met them with a volley of name tags–plastic, he noted–and seating assignments and admission cards. In a corner a woman who looked like an executive secretary helped a frail white-haired man from his immense, weighty overcoat. He moved with delicate, hesitant gestures, and Gordon recognized him as Jules Chardaman, the nuclear physicist who had discovered some particle or other and received a Nobel for his trouble. I thought he was dead, Gordon mused.

"Gordon! Tried to call you last night," called a brisk voice behind him.

He turned, hesitated, and shook hands with Saul Shriffer. "I got in late and went out for a walk."

"In this town?"

"It seemed safe."

Saul shook his head. "Maybe they don't mug dreamers."

"I probably don't look prosperous enough."

"Nah," Saul flashed hs nationally known smile. "You're looking great.

Hey, how's the wife? She with you?"

"Oh, she's fine. She's been visiting her parents–you know, showing off the kids. She's flying in this morning, though." He glanced at his watch.

"Should be here soon."

"Hey, great, like to see her again. How about dinner tonight?"

"No, we've got plans." Gordon realized he had said this too quickly and added, "Maybe tomorrow, though. How long will you be in town?"

"I have to zip over to New York by noon. I'll catch you next time I'm on the coast."

"Fine."

Saul unconsciously pursed his lips, as though considering how to put his next sentence. "You know, those parts of the old messages you kept to yourself ..."

Gordon kept his face blank. "Just the names, that's all. My public statement is that they were lost in the noise. Which is partly true."

"Yeah." Saul studied his face. "Look, after all this much time, it seems to me– look, it would make a really interesting sidelight on the whole thing."

"No. Come on, Saul, we've had this discussion before."

"It's been years. I fail to see— "

"I'm not sure I got the names right. A letter here and there and you've got the wrong name and the wrong people."

"But look–"

"Forget it. I'm never going to release the parts I'm not sure about."

Gordon smiled to take the edge off his voice. There were other reasons, too, but he wasn't going to go into that.

Saul shrugged goodnaturedly and fingered his newly grown moustache.

"Okay, okay. Just thought I'd give it a try, catch you in a mellow mood.

How're the experiments going?"

"We're still hammering away at the sensitivity. You know how it is."

"Getting any signals?"

"Can't say. The hash is unbelievable."

Saul frowned. "There should be something there."

"Oh, there is."

"No, I mean besides that stuff you got back in '67. I'll grant you that was a clear message. But it wasn't in any code or language we know."

"The universe is a big place."

"You say they were from a long way off?"

"Look, anything I say is pure guess. But it was a strong signal, tightly beamed. We were able to show that the fact that it lasted three days and then shut off was due to the earth passing through a tachyon beam. I'd say we just got in the way of somebody else's communications net."

"Ummm." Saul pondered this. "Y'know, if we could only be sure those messages we can't decode weren't from a human transmitter, far up in the future ..."

Gordon grinned. Saul was one of the biggest names in science now, at least in the public eye. His popularizations made the bestseller lists, his television series ran in prime time. Gordon finished for him, "You mean, we'd have proof of an alien technology—"

"Sure. Worth trying, isn't it?"

"Maybe so."

The big bronze doors at the end of the foyer swung back. The crowd shuffled toward the reception room beyond. Gordon had noted that people in groups move as though by a slow diffusion process, and this mob was no different. Many he knew–Chet Manahan, a methodical solid state physicist who always wore a vest with matching tie, spoke five languages, and made sure you knew this within a few minutes of meeting him; Sidney Roman, a swarthy, delicate, thin man whose precise equations led to outrageous conclusions, some of which had proved right; Louisa Schwartz, who, contrary to her name, had luminous white skin and a mind that catalogued everything in astrophysics, including most of the unprintable gossip; George Maklin, red-faced and loud, shoulders rippling with muscle, who carried out experiments suspended by whiskers into liquid helium, measuring wisps of momentum; Douglas Karp, a czar of a rabble of graduate students which cranked out two papers a month on the band structure of assorted solids, enabling him to lecture in sunny summer schools in the Mediterranean; Brian Nantes, with enormous, booming energy which in his papers squeezed into adroit, laconic equations, denuded of commentary or argument with his contemporaries, with a decidedly pearls-before-swine abstract to accompany the text–and many more, some casually met at conferences, others opposed in heated sessions of APS meetings, most of them dim faces associated with the stutter of initials beneath interesting papers, or met at a sandwich-and-beer faculty lunch just before delivering a seminar, or seen receiving polite applause at a meeting after they had mumbled an invited paper into a microphone. In this pack Saul drifted away, halfway through describing a plan to ferret out extraterrestrials by the squiggles and beeps in the tachyon spectrum.