Timescape

soft of intellectual in my book. It’s a fair trade, I’d say. He’s getting some amusement from it, and I’m getting his pound notes.”

“But he must think you’ll succeed.”

“Must he? Maybe. I’m not sure I do myself.”

Marjorie seemed shocked. “Then why do it?”

“It’s good physics. I don’t know if we can alter the past. No one does. Physics is in chaos about this thing. If there weren’t a virtually complete shutdown of research, chaps would be swarming over the problem. I’ve got a chance here to do the definitive experiments, unit’s the reason. Science, luv.”

Marjorie frowned at this but said nothing. Renfrew surveyed his handiwork. She began busily ranking jars on the shelves. Each had a rubber collar and metal sealing clamps. Inside swam vague blobs of vegetables. Renfrew found the sight distinctly unappetizing.

Marjorie abruptly turned from her work, her face knitted with concern, and said, “You’re deceiving him, aren’t you?”

“Na, luv, I’m—what’s the phrase?—keeping his expectations high.”

“He expects—”

“Look, Peterson’s interested in the problem. I’m not responsible for guessing his true motivations. Christ, you’ll have him on the couch babbling about his early childhood next.”

“I’ve never met the man,” she said stiffly “Right, see, this conversation has no basis.”

“It’s you we’re properly talking about. You—”

“Hold on. The thing you don’t realize, Marj old lass, is that nobody really knows anything about these experiments. You can’t accuse me of false adverts yet. And for that matter, Peterson seemed as concerned as I was with the interference we’re getting, so maybe I misread him.”

“Someone’s interfering?”

“No, no, something is. A lot of incoming noise. I’ll filter it out, though. I planned to work on that very point this afternoon.”

Marjorie said firmly, “The mercury hunt.”

She clicked on the radio, which blared to a jingle, “Your ho-ney is mo-ney, in the new job-sharing plant That’s right, a couple splitting one job can help the current—”

Renfrew switched it off. “Be good to get out of the house,” he said pointedly.

•  •  •

He pedaled up to the Cav with Johnny. They passed farm buildings taken over by squatters and Renfrew grimaced to himself. He had gone round to several, trying to find the couple who had frightened Marjorie. They’d given him a surly look and a rude off-wi’-ya. The constable was no help either.

As he passed the slumped walls of a barn Renfrew smelled the sour tang of coal smoke. Someone inside was burning the outlawed low-quality grade, but there was no bluish plume for the constable to trace. That was fairly typical. They’d spend good money on a device to suppress the visible emission, then quickly make up the cost in cheap fuel. Renfrew had heard otherwise respectable people bragging about doing precisely that, like children getting away with some delicious vice their parents had forbidden. They were the sort who threw their bottles and tins into great ruddy heaps down the woods, too, rather than trouble to recycle. He sometimes thought that the only people who obeyed the regs were the dwindling middle classes.

At the Cav, Johnny wandered the shadowy corridors while Renfrew picked up some notes. Johnny prevailed on him to take a quick ride up to the Institute for Astronomy, just across the Madingley Road. The boy had played there often and now that it was closed seldom saw it. There were big potholes in the Madingley where the tanks had come in to quell the riot in ’96. Renfrew tipped into one and got a stain of mud on his trouser leg. They pedaled by the long low office building of the Institute, with its outsized yawning windows, a once popular American style from an oil-rich era. They pumped up to the main building, a nineteenth-century pile of tan sandstone with its antiquated astronomical dome atop floors housing the library, offices, and the star chart bays. They glided by the little 36-incher dome on the way and then past the machine shop sheds, where the windows had been starred by the occasional passing sod. Their tires spat gravel as they wheeled up the long driveway. The bright white casements of the windows framed a black interior. Renfrew was turning in the circular drive to go back down the slope to Madingley when the big front doors lurched open. A short man peered out. He was wearing a formal suit with waistcoat and regimental tie, well knotted. He was sixtyish and studied them over bifocals. “You’re not the constable,” the man said in reedy surprise.

Renfrew, thinking this point obvious, stopped but said nothing. “Mr. Frost!” Johnny cried. “Remember me?”

Frost frowned, then brightened. “Johnny, yes, haven’t seen you for years. You came to our Observer’s Night regular as the stars.”

“Until you stopped giving them,” the boy accused.

“The Institute closed,” Frost said apologetically, bending over at the waist to bring his face to Johnny’s level. “There was no money.”

“You’re still here.”

“So I am. Our electricity is cut off, however, and you can’t have the public in where they could fall in the dark.”

Renfrew broke in with, “I’m John Renfrew, by the way—Johnny’s dad.”

“Yes. I thought you might be the constable. I sent word this morning,” Frost said, pointing at a nearby window. The frame was smashed. “They simply kicked it in.”

“They get anything?”

“A great lot. I tried to have those replaced, back when we put in the wire mesh on the corridor inside. I told them the library was an open invitation. But would they listen to me, the mere curator? No, silly, of course not.”

“Did they take the telescope?” Johnny asked.

“No, that’s worthless, very nearly. They nicked the books.”

“Then I can still look through the telescope?”

“What books?” Renfrew could not imagine that academic references were of much value now.

“The collector’s items, of course,” Frost said with the proper pride of a curator. “Took a second edition Kepler, a second Copernicus, the original of the seventeenth-century astrometrical atlas—the lot, really. They were specialists, they were. Skipped the newer tomes. They also knew the fifth editions from the third, without taking them out of their protective sleeves. Not so easily done, when you’re working in a dead hurry and with a pocket torch.”

Renfrew was impressed, not the least because this was the first time he had ever heard anyone use the word “tomes” in conversation. “Why were they in a hurry?”

“Because they knew I would return. I had gone out at dusk for my evening constitutional, to the war cemetery and back.”

“You live here?”

“When the Institute closed I had nowhere to go.” Frost drew himself up primly. “There are several of us. Old astronomers, mostly, turned out by their colleges. They live down the other building—it’s warmer in winter. These bricks hold the chill. I tell you, there was a time when the colleges cared for their old Fellows. When Boyle founded the Institute we had everything. Now it’s into the dustbin with the lot, never mind the past, it’s the current crisis that matters and—”

“I say, that’s the constable coming there.” Renfrew pointed, seizing on the distant figure on a bicycle to cut off the stream of academic lament. He had heard much the same lines so often over the last few years that they had ceased to have any effect aside from boredom. The arrival of the constable, puffing and drawn, led Frost to produce the one volume the thieves hadn’t made off with, a late edition Kepler. Renfrew studied the book for a moment while Frost went on to the constable, demanding a general alert to catch the thieves on the roads if possible. The pages were dry and brittle, crackling as Renfrew turned them. From long exposure to the new methods of making books he had forgotten how a line of type could raise an impression on the other side of the page, as if the press of history was behind each word. The heavily leaded letters were broad and the ink a deep black. The ample margins, the precise celestial drawings, the heft of the volume in his hands, all seemed to speak