Timescape (54 page)

Gordon could do the observations, see, and Saul would look at the data and see what they meant.

Gordon wormed away diagonally, letting a rapidly talking clump of particle physicists come between him and Saul. The buffet lunch lay dead ahead of him. Characteristically, the scientists wasted no time politely hanging back from the self-serve table. Gordon piled beef on bread and escaped with a presentable sandwich He bit in. The sting of the horseradish cleared his sinuses, watering his eyes. The punch was a superior grade of champagne diluted with pungent orange juice.

Shriffer was surrounded now by a crescent of approving faces. It was odd, how celebrity invaded science these days, so that appearing on the Johnny Carson show was more effective with the NSF than publishing a brilliant series of papers in
Physical Review
.

Yet in the end it was media fixation that had done it all, Gordon reflected. At the conclusion of the press conference of Ramsey and Hussinger, Gordon had felt the constricting heat flow through him and seem to wash through the air. Then, watching Cronkite talk grimly into the camera on November 22, he had felt it again. Was that the signature of a true, unavoidable paradox? Was that when the future had radically altered? There was no way to tell, at least not yet. He had pored over records of atmospheric phenomena, of cosmic ray counts, of radio noise and starlight fluence–and found nothing. There were no instruments yet designed which could measure the effect. Gordon felt, though, that he had a subjective perception of when it had happened. Perhaps because he was close to the site where the paradoxes were driven home? Or because he was already strung out, as Penny would've put it, that is, fine-tuned? He might never know.

A passing face nodded. "Quite a day," Isaac Lakin said formally, and moved on. Gordon nodded. The remark was suitably ambiguous. Lakin had become a director at the NSF, shepherding the magnetic resonance work. Gordon's controversial area, tachyon detection, was under another man. Lakin was now best known for his coauthorship of the "spontaneous resonance" paper in
PRL
. The refracted frame had lifted him, agreeably buoyant, into his present position.

The other coauthor, Cooper, had done reasonably well, too. His thesis went through the committee with slick speed, once stripped of the spontaneous resonance effects. He had gone off to Penn State with evident relief. There, postdoccing his way through some respectable electron spin work led to a faculty position. He was now safely worrying various III-V

compounds into yielding up their transport coefficients. Gordon saw him at meetings and they had an occasional drink together, sharing wary conversation.

He eavesdropped on gossip about revival of the Orion spaceship idea, and new work by Dyson. Then, as Gordon was fetching another sandwich and talking to a reporter, a particle physicist approached. He wanted to talk over plans for a new accelerator which had a chance of producing a tachyon cascade. The energy required was enormous. Gordon listened politely. When a revealing skeptical smile began to spread over his face, he forced his lips back into an expression of professorial consideration. The high-energy types were struggling to make tachyons now, but most outside observers felt the effort was premature. Better theory was needed.

Gordon had chaired several panels on the subject and had grown thick-skinned about new, big-money proposals. The particle physicists were addicted to their immense accelerators. The man who has only a hammer to work with finds that every new problem needs a—"

Gordon nodded, looked sage, sipped champagne, said little. Though the evidence for tachyons was now overwhelming, they did not fit into the standard ongoing program of physics. They were more than simply a new species of particle. They couldn't be put on the shelf beside the mesons and hyperons and kaons. Before this physicists had, with the instincts of accountants, decomposed the world into a comfortable zoology. The other, simpler particles had only minor differences. They fit into the universe like marbles in a sack, filling but not altering the fabric. Tachyons didn't. They made new theories possible, kicking up the dust of cosmological questions by their mere existence. The implications were being worked out.

Beyond that, though, were the messages themselves. They had ceased in 1963, before Zinnes could get extensive confirmation. Some physicists thought they were real. Others, forever wary of sporadic phenomena, thought they must have been some fortuitous error. The situation had a lot in common with Joe Weber's detection of gravitational waves in 1969.

Later experiments by others had found no waves. Did that mean Weber was wrong, or that the waves came in occasional bursts? It might be decades before another flurry could settle the question. Gordon had talked to Weber, and the wiry, silver-maned experimenter seemed to take the whole thing as a kind of inevitable comedy. In science you usually can't convert your opponents, he had said; you have to outlive them. For Weber there was hope; Gordon felt his own case was forever uncheckable.

The new theory by Tanninger certainly pointed the way. Tanninger had put tachyons into the general relativity theory in a highly original way.

The old question that came up in quantum mechanics, of who the observer was, had finally been resolved. Tachyons were a new kind of wave phenomenon, causality waves looping between past and future, and the paradoxes they could produce gave a new kind of physics. The essence of paradox was the possibility of mutually contradictory outcomes, and Tanninger's picture of the causal loop was like that of the quantum-mechanical waves. The difference came in the interpretation of the experiment. In Tanninger's picture, a kind of wave function, resembling the old quantum function, gave the various outcomes of the paradox loop. But the new wave function did not describe probabilities–it spoke of different universes. When a loop was set up, the universe split into two new universes. If the loop was of the simple killing-your-grandfather type, then there would result one universe where the grandfather lived and the grandson disappeared. The grandson reappeared in a second universe, having traveled back in time, where he shot his grandfather and lived out his life, passing through the years which were forever altered by his act. No one in either universe thought the world was paradoxical.

All this came from using tachyons to produce the standing-wave kind of time loop. Without tachyons, no splitting into different universes occurred. Thus the future world that had sent Gordon the messages was gone, unreachable. They had separated sometime in the fall of 1963; Gordon was sure of that. Some event had made Renfrew's experiment impossible or unnecessary. It could have been the Ramsey-Hussinger press conference, or putting the message in the safety deposit box, or the Kennedy thing. One of those, yes. But which?

He moved among the crowd, greeting friends, letting his mind drift. He recalled that a human being, eating and moving around, gave off 200

watts of body heat. This room trapped most of it, bringing prickly perspiration to his brow. His Adam's apple snagged on the knot of his tie.

"Gordon!" a silvery voice called to him above the tangle of talk. He turned. Marsha threaded her way through the crowd. He bent and kissed her. She was toting an overnight case, swinging it with abandon as she turned to call hellos to people she knew. She told him about the crush of traffic getting into town after her shuttle flight from LaGuardia, eyebrows darting upward to underline a word, hands describing averted collisions with swooping arcs. The prospect of a few days of freedom from the children gave her a manic, gay air that spread to Gordon. He realized he had grown somber as this overheated, glittery reception went on, and Marsha had erased that in a moment. It was this quality in her, of swelling life, that he remembered best when he was away from her. "Oh, God, there's that Lakin," she said, eyes rolling up in a parody of panic. "Let's move the opposite way, I don't want to start off with him."

Wifely loyalty. She tugged him to the shrimp salad, which he had passed over, probably following instinctively a genetically ingrained dietary axiom. Marsha snared a few of their friends along the way–to form a protective barrier against Lakin, she said. All this was done with comic exaggeration, drawing chuckles from the somber faces. A waiter sought them out and delivered glasses cff champagne.

"Ummm, I'll bet this isn't what's in the bowl over there," Marsha said, sipping, lips puckered in approval. The waiter hesitated, then agreed, "The Chairman said to bring out some of the private stock," and then was gone, fearing he had revealed too much. Marsha seemed to polarize the medium, Gordon noted, drawing friends out of corners of the large room to form a cloud around them. Carroway appeared, shaking hands, chuckling. Gordon basked in her compact energy. He had never been able to relax so with Penny, he remembered, and maybe that should have told him something from the start. In 1968, when they were in the thick of their last elaborate sparring, he and Penny had come to Washington in winter again. It was a veiled city. Fog rose from the Potomac's shifting currents. He had avoided dinner parties with physicists that trip, he recalled, mostly because Penny found them boring and he could not predict when she would get into one of her political arguments or, worse, descend into a swollen silence. They had areas they had silently agreed not to talk about, areas which expanded in time. Each had axes to grind–you're an injustice collector, Penny had accused, once but, perversely, the good periods between the bad had become radiant with a released energy. He had oscillated in mood through 1967 and '68, not buying Penny's Freud-steeped recipes for repair, but discovering no alternative. Isn't it a little obvious to be so hostile to analysis? she said once, and he had realized it was so; he felt the clanky, machinelike language was a betrayal, a trap. Psychology had modeled itself after the hard sdences, with physics as the shining example. But they had taken the old Newtonian clockwork as their example. To modern physics there was no ticktock world independent of the observer, no untouched mechanism, no way of describing a system without being involved in it. His intuition told him that no such exterior analysis could capture what rubbed and chafed between them. And so, in the descending days of 1968 his personal nucleus had fissioned, and a year later he met Marsha Gould from the Bronx, Marsha, short and dusky, and some inevitable paradigm had come home. Remembering the events now, seeing them sealed in amber, he smiled as Marsha brimmed beside him.

The western windows of the long room now let in a light like beaten brass. Luminaries from the funding agencies were arriving, customarily late. Gordon nodded, shook hands, made appropriate small talk. Into Marsha's crescent of conversation came Ramsey, smoking a thin cigar.

Gordon greeted him with a conspiratorial wink. Then a face said, "I wanted to meet you, so I'm afraid I just plain gatecrashed."

Gordon smiled without interest, bound up in his own recollections, and then noticed the young man's self-lettered name badge: Gregory Markham. He froze, hand hanging in midair. The surrounding chatter faded and he could distinctly feel his heart thumping. He said stupidly, "I, ah, see."

"I did my thesis in plasma physics, but I've been readin' Tanninger's papers, and yours of course, and, hell, I think that's where the real physics is going to be done. I mean there's a whole set of cosmological consequences, don't you think? It seems to me " and Markham, who Gordon saw was really only a decade or so younger than he, was off, sketching ideas he had about Tanninger's work. Markham had some interesting notions about the nonlinear solutions, ideas Gordon had not heard before. Despite his shock, he found himself following the technical parts with interest. He could tell Markham had the right feel for the work.

Tanninger's use of the new calculus of exterior differential forms had made his ideas difficult for the older generation of physicists to approach, but to Markham it presented no problem; he was not hobbled by the more accepted, gnarled notation. The essential images conjured up in the mind's eye, of paradoxical curves descending with elliptic logic to the plane of physical reality, Markham had mastered. Gordon found himself becoming excited; he yearned for a place to sit down and scribble out some arguments of his own, to let the impacted symbols of mathematics speak for him. But then an aide approached, wearing white gloves, and intruded, nodding respectfully but firmly and saying, "Dr. Bernstein, Mrs.

Bernstein, we require your presence now." Markham shrugged and grinned lopsidedly and in what seemed an instant was gone among the crowd. Gordon collected himself and took Marsha's arm. The aide cleared a path for them. Gordon had an impulse to call out to Markham, find him, ask him to dinner that evening, not let the man slip away. But something held him back. He wondered if this event itself, this chance meeting, could have been the thing that framed the paradoxes–but no, that made no sense, the break had come in 1963, of course, yes. This Markham was not the man who would calculate and argue in that distant Cambridge. The Markham he had just seen would not die in a plane accident. The future would be different.

A puzzled expression flickered across his face and he moved woodenly.

They met the Secretary for Health, Education & Welfare, a man with a tapered nose and a tight, pouting mouth, the Varo forming a fleshy exclamation point. The aide ushered them all into a small private elevator, where they stood uncomfortably close to each other–inside our personal boundary spaces, Gordon observed abstractedly–and the Secretary for HEW emitted boisterous one-liners, all shaped with a speech writer's gloss. Gordon recalled that this particular Cabinet appointment had been a highly political one. The elevator slid open to reveal a pinched passageway packed with unmoving people. Several men gave them an obvious once-over and then their eyes went neutral again, heads routinely swiveling back to assigned directions. Security, Gordon supposed. The Secretary led them through a narrow channel and into a larger room. A short woman came bustling over, dressed as though about to go to the opera. She looked like the sort who habitually put her hands up to her string of pearls and took a deep breath before speaking. As Gordon was framing this thought she did precisely that, saying, "The auditorium is filled already, we never thought there would be so many, so early. I don't think there is any point, Mr. Secretary in staying back here. Just through that way. Everybody's out there already almost."