Timescape (55 page)

The Secretary moved forward. Marsha put a hand on Gordon's shoulder and reached up. "Your tie's too tight. You look like you're trying to strangle yourself." She loosened the knot with deft fingers, smoothed it out. Her teeth bit into her lower lip in her concentration, pressing until the red flesh was pale beneath the slick finish of lpstick. He rememered the way the beach turned white beneath his feet as he ran on it.

"Come. Come," the pearled lady urged them. They walked across a stark, marbled wedge of space and abruptly onto a stage. Spotlighted figures milled about. Chairs scraped. Another aide in the absurd white gloves took Marsha's arm. He led the two of them into the glare. There were three rows of chairs, most already occupied. Marsha was at the far end of the front row and Gordon next to her. The aide saw that Marsha negotiated a safe landing. Gordon plunked himself down. The aide evaporated. Marsha was wearing a dress of fashionable shortness. Her efforts to pull the hem down over the curve of her knees caught his attention. He was filled with an agreeable sense of ownership, that the luxuriant curve of thigh so concealed in public was his, could be his for the cost of a wordless gesture tonight.

He squinted to see past the battery of lights. A curving crowd of faces swam in the hfilf-space beyond the stage. They rustled with anticipation–not for him, he knew–and on the left a TV camera peered in cyclopean stupor at the vacant dais. A sound engineer tested the mikes.

Gordon searched the faces he could see. Was Markham out there? He trolled for the right combination of features. It had struck him how alike most people were, despite their vaunted individuality, and yet how quickly the eye could cut through the similarities to pick out the small details that separated known from stranger. Someone caught hs eye. He peered through the glare. No, it was Shriffer. Gordon wondered with amusement what Saul would think if he knew Markham was probably only meters away, an unknowing link to the lost world of the messages. Gordon would never reveal those distant names now. It would get into the press and confuse everything, prove nothing.

It was not only keeping the identities secret that made him slow to publish his full data. Most of what he had thought was noise in his earlier experiments was actually indecipherable signals. Those messages fled backward in time from some unfathomable future. They were scarcely absorbed at all by the present rather low-density distribution of matter in the universe. But as they ran backward, what was to men an expanding universe appeared to the tachyons as a contracting one. Galaxies drew together, packing into an ever-shrinking volume. This thicker matter absorbed tachyons better. As they flowed back into what was, to them, an imploding universe, increasing numbers of the tachyons were absorbed.

Finally, at the last instant before it compressed to a point, the universe absorbed a tachyon from each point in its own future. Gordon's measurement of the tachyon flux, integrated back in time, showed that the energy absorbed from the tachyons was enough to heat the compressed mass. This energy fueled the universal expansion. So to the eyes of men, the universe exploded from a single point because of what would happen, not what had. Origin and destiny intertwined. The snake ate its tail.

Gordon wanted to be absolutely sure before he reported on the flux and his conclusions. He was sure it would not be well received.

The world did not want paradox. The reminder that time's vast movements were loops we could not perceive the mind veered from that.

At least part of the scientific opposition to the messages was based on precisely that flat fact, he was sure. Animals had evolved in such a way that the ways of nature seemed simple to them; that was a definite survival trait. The laws had shaped man, not the other way around. The cortex did not like a universe that fundamentally ran both forward and back.

So he would not smudge the issue with a few tattered names, not for Shriffer's spotlight. Perhaps he would tell Markham, just as he would inevitably publish the faint calls he had measured from Epsilon ridani, eleven light years away. They were voices from an undated future, reporting shipboard maintenance details. No paradoxes there. Unless, of course, the information blunted the leap into rocketry now underway, aborted the upcoming space station by some contrary twist. That was always possible, he supposed. Then the universe would split again. The river would fork. But perhaps, when this was all understood and Tanninger's squiggles cut deeper into the riddle, they would know whether paradoxes should be avoided at all. Paradoxes did no true damage, after all. It was like having a dusky twin beyond the looking glass, identical but for his lefthanded-ness. And the nature of the tachyons made accidental paradox unlikely, anyway. A starship reporting back to its Earth would use tight beams, No fringing fields would by chance catch the present Earth on its helical whirl through space, intersect its gavotte around the galaxy.

Ramsey moved across his field of vision and jerked him back into this illuminated moment. Ramsey stubbed out his smoke, the slim cigar twisting like a dying insect. The man was nervous. Suddenly, a blare of recorded music. Hail to the Chief. Everyone on the stage stood, belying the fact that the man who entered from the right, smiling and waving a casual hand, was a public servant. President Scranton shook the Secretary's hand with media-sharpened warmth and took in the rest of the stage with a generalized smile. Despite himself, Gordon felt a certain zest. The President moved with a comfortable certainty, acknowledging the cheers and finally sitting beside the Secretary. Scranton had discredited Robert Kennedy, tripping the scowling younger brother in a tangle of Democratic wiretapping, and then the use of the intelligence community and the FBI against the Republicans. Gordon had found the charges difficult to believe at the time, particularly since Goldwater had uncovered the first hints.

But in retrospect it was good to be rid of the Kennedy dynasty idea, and the Imperial Presidency along with it.

The Secretary was at the dais now, making the mechanical introductions and slipping in the obligatory puffing-up of the administration. Gordon leaned over to Marsha and whispered, "Christ, I didn't make up a speech."

She said merrily, "Tell them about the future, Gordon."

He growled, "That future's only a dream now."

She replied laconically, "It's a poor sort of memory that works only backward."

Gordon grinned back at her. She had fetched that up from her reading to the kids, a line from the looking-glass, time-reversed scene, the White Queen. Gordon shook his head and sat back.

The Secretary had finished his prepared speech and now introduced the President to a solid round of applause. Scranton read the citation for Ramsey and Hussinger. The two men came forward, awkwardly managing to get in each other's way. The President handed over the two plaques amid applause. Ramsey glanced at his and then exchanged it with Hussinger's, to laughter from the audience. Polite hand clapping as they sat down. The Secretary came forward, shuffling papers, and handed some to the President. The next award was for some achievement in genetics which Gordon had never heard about. The recipient was a chunky Germanic woman who spread some pages before her on the dais and turned to the audience, plainly prepared for an extended history of her work. Scranton gave the Secretary a sidelong look and then moved back and sat down. He had been through such things before.

Gordon tried to concentrate on what she said, but lost interest when she launched into a salute to other workers in the field who regrettably could not be honored here today in such august surroundings.

He toyed with the question of what to say. He would never see the President again, never again even have the ear of so influential a person as the Secretary. Perhaps if he tried to convey something of what this all meant... His eyes strayed over the audience.

He had a sudden sense that time was here, not a relation between events, but a thing. What a specifically human comfort it was to see time as immutable, a weight you could not escape. Believing that, a man could give up swimming against this riverrun of seconds and simply drift, cease battering himself on time's flat face like an insect flapping against a blossom of light. If only–

He looked at Ramsey, reading his plaque, oblivious to the geneticist's ramble, and remembered the foaming waves at La Jolla, cupping forward out of Asia to break on the bare new land. Gordon shook his head, not knowing why, and reached for Marsha's hand. A warming press.

He thought of the names ahead, in that deflected future, who had tried to send a signal into the receding murk of history, and write it fresh again.

It took courage to send firefly hopes through the dark, phosphorescent dartings across an infinite swallowing velvet. They would need courage; the calamity they spoke of could engulf the world.

Scattered, polite applause. The President gave the hefty woman her plaque–the check would come later, Gordon knew–and she sat. Then Scranton peered into his bifocals and began to read, in the squarish vowels of Pennsylvania, the citation to Gordon Bernstein.

"–for investigations in nuclear magnetic resonance which produced a startling new effect–"

Gordon reflected that Einstein won the Nobel prize for the photoelectric effect, which was considered reasonably safe by 1921, and not for the still controversial theory of relativity. Good company to be in.

"–which, in a series of definitive experiments in 1963 and 1964 he showed could only be explained by the existence of a new kind of particle.

This strange particle, the tac–tac—"

The President stumbled over the pronunciation. Agreeing laughter rippled through the audience. Something pricked in Gordon's memory and he searched the dark bowl of faces. That laugh. Someone he knew?

"–tachyon, is capable of moving faster than the speed of light. This fact implies—"

The tight bun of hair, the lifted, almost jaunty chin. His mother was in the third row. She was wearing a dark coat and had come to see this day, see her son on the bright stage of history.

"–that the particles can themselves travel backward in time. The implications of this are of fundamental importance in many areas of modern science, from cosmology to–"

Gordon half rose, hands clenched. The proud energy in the way she beamed, head turned to the flow of words–

"–the structure of the subnuclear particles. This is truly an immense— "

But in the tangled rush of the months following November of 1963 she had died in Bellevue, before he ever saw her again.

"–scale, echoing the increasing connection–" The woman in the third row was probably an aging secretary, called forth to see the President.

Still, something in her alert gaze– The room wavered, light blurred into pools.

"—between the microscopic and the macroscopic, a theme— "

Moisture on his cheeks. Gordon peered through his fuzzed focus at the lanky outline of the President, seeing him as a darker blotch beneath the burning spotlights. Beyond him, no less real, were the names from Cambridge, each a figure, each knowing the others, but never wholly. The shadowy figures moved now beyond reach, bound for their own destinations just as he and Ramsey and Marsha and Lakin and Penny were. But they were all simply figures. A piercing light shone through them. They seemed frozen. It was the landscape itself which changed, Gordon saw at last, refracted by laws of its own. Time and space were themselves players, vast lands engulfing the figures, a weave of future and past. There was no riverrun of years. The abiding loops of causality ran both forward and back. The timescape rippled. with waves, roiled and flexed, a great beast in the dark sea.

The President had finished. Gordon stood. He walked to the dais on wooden feet.

"The Enrico Fermi Prize for—"

He could not read the citation on it. The faces hung before him. Eyes.

The glaring light–

He began to speak.

He saw the crowd and thought of the waves moving through them, breaking into white, swallowing foam. The small figures dimly sensed the eddies of the waves as paradox, as riddle, and heard the tick of time without knowing what they sensed, and clung to their linear illusions of past and future, of progression, of their opening births and yawning deaths to come. Words caught in his throat. He went on. And he thought of Markham and his mother and all these uncountable people, never loosening their grip on their hopes, and their strange human sense, their last illusion, that no matter how the days moved through them, there always remained the pulse of things coming, the sense that even now there was yet still time.

The End