Timescape

workers now… damn students want to take shop courses…” When she next looked his way conversation had trickled away.

Greg slipped away from the group and walked to the edge of the patio, his face clouded. Marjorie followed.

“I had no idea things were being cut back so,” she said.

“It’s happening everywhere.” A resigned, flat tone.

“Well,” she said, putting a bright, cheerful lift in her voice, “we here all hope things will straighten up in a short while and the labs will reopen. The colleges are quite optimistic that—”

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” he said sourly. Then, glancing at her, he seemed to shake himself free of the mood. “Or, if horses were vicious, rides would go begging.” He smiled. “I love transmuted cliches, don’t you?”

It was this sort of sudden, darting way of thinking Marjorie had come to associate with a species of scientist, the theoretical types. They were hard to understand, granted, but more interesting than the experimenters, like her John. She smiled back at him. “Surely your year here at Cambridge has taken you away from budget worries?”

“Um. Yes, I suppose it’s better to live here in somebody else’s past, rather than your own. It’s a lovely place to forget the world outside. I’ve been enjoying the leisure of the theory class.”

“In your ivory tower? This is a town of dreaming spires, as I think the poem goes.”

“Oxford’s the town of dreaming spires,” he corrected her. “Cambridge is more like perspiring dreams.”

“Scientific ambition?”

He grimaced. “The rule of thumb is that you don’t do much first-class work past forty. That’s mostly wrong, of course. There are lots of great discoveries made late in life. But on the average, yes, you feel the ability slipping away from you. It’s like composers, I guess. Flashes out of nowhere when you’re young, and… and more a sense of consolidation, layering things on, when you’re older.”

“This time communication thing you and John are onto certainly seems exciting. A lot of a dash there.”

Greg brightened. “Yes, it’s a real chance again. Here’s a hot topic and nobody’s around to dig in except me. If they hadn’t closed most of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, there’d be a squad of bright young guys swarming over it.”

Marjorie stepped further away from the rest of the party, towards the moist masses of green that regimented their garden. “I’ve been meaning to ask someone who knows,” she began with a touch of uncertainty, “just what this tachyon thing of John’s is. I mean, he explains it, but not much gets through my arts education, I’m afraid.”

Greg clasped his hands behind him in a studied way, staring up into the sky. Marjorie noted yet another sudden shift in him; his expression became remote, as though he were peering at some persistent interior riddle. He gazed up, as if unmindful of the awkwardly stretching silence between them. Above, she saw, an airplane scratched an arc, green tail light winking, and she had a curious, uneasy feeling. Its vapor trail spread, cold silver on a sky of slate.

“I think the hardest thing to see,” Greg said, starting as though he were composing an article in his head, “is why particles traveling faster than light should mean anything about time.”

“Yes, that’s it. John always jumps over that, into a lot of stuff about receivers and focusing.”

“The myopia of a man who has to actually make the damned thing work. Understandable. Well look, you remember what Einstein showed a century ago—that light was a kind of speed limit?”

“Yes.”

“Well, the mindless, popular description of relativity is—” here he arched his eyebrows, as if to put visible, disdaining quotation marks about the next phrase “—that ‘everything is relative.’ Meaningless statement, of course. A better shorthand is that there are no privileged observers in the universe.”

“Not even physicists are privileged?”

Greg smiled at the jibe. “Especially physicists, since we know what’s going on. Point is, Einstein snowed that two people moving with respect to each other can’t agree on whether two events happen at the same time. That’s because light takes a finite time to travel from the events to the two people, and that time is different for each person. I can show you that with some simple mathematics—”

“Oh, don’t, truly.” She laughed.

“Agreed. This is a party, after all. Thing is, your husband has gone after some big fish here. His tachyon experiment takes Einstein’s ideas a step further, in a way. The discovery of particles traveling faster than light means those two moving observers won’t agree about which event came first, either. That is, the sense of time gets scrambled.”

“But surely that’s merely a difficulty of communication. A problem with the tachyon beams and so on.”

“No, dead wrong. It’s fundamental. See, the ‘light barrier,’ as it was called, kept us in a universe which had a disordered sense of what’s simultaneous. But at least we could tell which way time flowed! Now we can’t even do that.”

“Using these particles?” Marjorie said doubtfully.

“Yes. They rarely occur in nature, we think, so we haven’t seen the effects of them before. But now—”

“Wouldn’t it be more exciting to build a tachyon spaceship? Go to the stars?”

He shook his head fiercely. “Not at all. All John can make is streams of particles, not solid objects. Anyway, how do you get onto a spaceship moving by you faster than light? The idea’s nonsense. No, the real impact here is the signaling, a whole new kind of physics. And I… I’m lucky to be in on it.”

Marjorie instinctively put her hand out and patted his arm, feeling a burst of quiet joy at this last sentence. It was good to see someone wholly involved with something beyond himself, especially these days. John was the same way, of course, but with John it was somehow different. His emotions were bottled up in an obsession with machinery and with some inner turbulence, almost a defiant anger at the universe for withholding its secrets. Perhaps that was the difference between merely thinking about experiments, as Greg did, and actually having to do them. It must be harder to believe in serene mathematical beauties when you have dirty hands.

James approached. “Greg, have you any information on the political mood in Washington? I was wondering…”

Marjorie saw the moment between herself and Greg was broken and she moved off, surveying the geometry of her guests. James and Greg fell to discussing politics. Greg shifted conversational gears immediately. They quickly disposed of the incessant strikes, the Trades Union Council taking most of the blame. James asked when the American government might reopen the stock market. John was hovering rather awkwardly. How odd, Marjorie thought, for a man to be so ill at ease in his own home. She sensed, from the wrinkling of his brow, that he was uncertain whether to join the two men. He knew nothing of the stock market and rather despised it as a form of gambling. She sighed and took pity on him.

“John, come and give me a hand, will you? I’m going to put the first course on the table now.”

He turned with relief and followed her into the house. She checked the mottled gray pate and touched up the plates with carrot curls and lettuce from her vegetable garden. John helped her set out butter pats and Melba toast made from home-baked bread. He gingerly popped open some of her homemade wine.

Marjorie went among the knots of conversing people, shepherding them with little bursts of bright invitation toward the dining table. She felt rather like a sheep dog, doubling back to urge on those who had snagged at a point of interest and had stopped drifting in from the garden. There were murmured comments of appreciation at the table, set with flowers from the garden and individual candles cleverly folded into the napkins. She organized them around the table, Jan next to James as they seemed to be getting on well together. Greg sat by Heather; she seemed a bit nervous about this.

“Marjorie, you’re a marvel,” Heather declared. “This pate is delicious—and this is home-made bread, isn’t it? However do you manage, with the power rationing and everything?”

“God, yes. Terrible, isn’t it?” Greg exclaimed. “I mean the power rationing,” he added quickly. “The pate is excellent. Good bread, too. But to have electricity only four hours a day—incredible. I don’t know how you people can live with it,” and the table dissolved into “It’s an experimental measure, you understand”… “think it will last?”… “too many inequities”… “factories get power, of course”… “staggered working hours”… “ones who suffer—old codgers like us”… “the poor don’t care, do they?”… “as long as they can open a tin of beans and a pint of beer”… “the wealthy who have all the electrical gadgets who”… “that’s why it’ll be thrown straight out”… “I just do