Timescape

They all exaggerated, Marjorie thought, especially the press. History was a series of crises, after all, and they’d all survived so far. John worried about it, she knew, but really, things hadn’t changed all that much.

CHAPTER SIX

SEPTEMBER 25, 1962

GORDON BERNSTEIN PUT DOWN HIS PENCIL WITH DELIBERATE slowness. He held it between thumb and forefinger and watched the tip tremble in the air. It was an infallible test; as he brought the pencil lead near the formica table top, the jittering of his hand made a tick-tick-tick rhythm. No matter how strongly he willed the hand to be still, the ticking continued. As he listened it seemed to swell and become louder than the muted chugging of the roughing pumps around him.

Abruptly Gordon smashed the pencil down, gouging a black hole in the table, snapping off the lead, splintering the wood and yellow paint.

“Hey, ah—”

Gordon’s head jerked up. Albert Cooper was standing beside him. How long had he been there?

“I, ah, checked with Doctor Grundkind,” Cooper said, looking away from the pencil. “Their whole rig is off the air.”

“You looked it over yourself?” Gordon’s voice came out thin and wheezing, overcontrolled.

“Yeah, well, they’re kinda gettin’ tired of me coming around,” Cooper said sheepishly. “This time they unplugged all their stuff from the wall outlets, even.”

Gordon nodded silently.

“Well, I guess that’s it.”

“What do you mean?” Gordon said evenly.

“Look, we’ve been working on this for—what?—four days.”

“So?”

“We’re at a dead end.”

“Why?”

“Grundkind’s low-temperature group was the last candidate on our list. We’ve got everybody in the building shut down.”

“Right.”

“So this noise—it can’t be spillover from them.” “Uh huh.”

“And we know it isn’t leaking in from outside.”

“The chicken wire we wrapped around the apparatus proves that,” Gordon agreed, nodding at the metal cage now embracing the entire magnet assembly. “It should shield out stray signals.”

“Yeah. So it has to be some screwup in our electronics.”

“Nope.”

“Why not?” Cooper demanded impatiently. “Hell, maybe Hewlett-Packard is shittin’ us on the specs, how do we know?”

“We’ve checked the rig ourselves.”

“But that’s got to be it.”

“No,” Gordon said with compressed energy. “No, there’s something else.” His hand shot out and seized a stack of x-y recorder plots. “I’ve been taking these for two hours. Look.”

Cooper paged through the red-gridded sheets. “Well, it looks a little less noisy. I mean, the noise has got some regular spikes in it.”

“I tuned it in. Improved the resolution.”

“So? It’s still noise,” Cooper said irritably.

“No, it isn’t.”

“Huh? Of course it is.”

“Look at those spikes I brought up out of the hash. Look at their spacing.”

Cooper fanned the sheets out on the formica table top. After a moment he said, “I’m just eyeballing it, but… well, looks like they come at only two different intervals.”

Gordon nodded energetically. “Correct. That’s what I noticed. What we’re seeing here is a lot of background noise—damned if I know where that’s coming from—with some regular stuff on top.”

“How’d you get these plots?”

“Used the lock-in correlator, to cull out the genuine noise. This structure, this spacing—it’s there, probably been there all the time.”

“We just never looked closely enough.”

“We ‘knew’ it was garbage, and why study garbage? Stupid.” Gordon shook his head, smiling wryly at himself.

Cooper’s forehead wrinkled as he stared off into space. “I don’t get it. What’ve these pulses got to do with the nuclear resonance?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

“But, hell, that’s what this experiment is. I’m measuring the big nuclear resonance spike, when we flip the spins of the atomic nuclei. These pulses—”

“They’re not resonances. Not as I understand a simple resonance, anyway. Something’s tipping over those nuclear spins, all right, but… wait a sec.”

Gordon stared down at the x-y graphs. His left hand twitched absently at a button on his rumpled blue shirt. “I don’t think this is any sort of frequency-dependent effect.”

“But that’s what we’re plotting. The intensity of the signal received, versus the frequency we see it at.”

“Yes, but that assumes everything’s steady.”

“Well, it is.”

“Who says? Suppose the noise comes in bursts?”

“Why should it?”

“Damn it!” Gordon slammed a fist down, sending the snapped pencil skittering off the table. “Try the idea on for size! Why is it every student wants things spelled out for him?”

“Well, okay.” Cooper earnestly knitted his forehead into a worried expression. Gordon could see the man was obviously too tired to do any real thinking. For that matter, so was he. They’d been hammering away at this nightmare problem for days, sleeping a minimal amount and going out for meals in greasy fast-food franchises. Hell, he hadn’t even got down to the beach to do any jogging. And Penny—Christ, he’d hardly caught a glimpse of her. She’d said something abrupt and feisty to him last night, just before he fell asleep, and it hadn’t registered with him until he was getting dressed, alone, this morning. So there was some patching-up to do there, when he got home. If he ever got home, he added, because he was damned if he’d give up on this puzzle until…

“Hey, try this,” Cooper said, jarring Gordon out of his musing. “Suppose we’re seeing a time-varying input here, the way you said it was, you know, days ago—when we started searching for outside noise sources. Our transcribing pen is moving at a constant rate across the paper, right?” Gordon nodded. “So these spikes here are spaced about a centimeter apart, and then two spaced half a centimeter. Then a one centimeter interval, three half-centimeters, and so on.”

Gordon suddenly saw what he was driving at, but he let Cooper finish.

“That’s the way the signal came in, spaced out in time. Not frequency, time.”

Gordon nodded. It was obvious, now that he stared at the wiggles and peaks of the recording pens. “Something coming in bursts, all across the frequency spectrum we’re studying.” He pursed his lips. “Bursts with long intervals between them, then some with shorter intervals.”

“Right.” Cooper nodded enthusiastically. “That’s it.”

“Short ones, long ones… Short, long, short, short. Like…”