Timescape

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 sciences, 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 reading Tanninger’s papers, and yours of course, and, well, 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 two 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.”

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 lipstick. He remembered 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 half-space beyond the stage. They rustled with anticipation—not for him, he knew—and to 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 his 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 all tachyons 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 Eridani, 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 lefthandedness. And the nature of the tachyons