Timescape

stuff. A certified authority on a nonexistent subject. I can get the attention of the academic community.”

“Yeah, but…”

“One problem at a time, Gordon!”

“Well…”

“First, the picture. Later, the rest.”

“Well…” Gordon had a class coming up. Saul had a hypnotic quality about him, the ability to make notions seem plausible and even obvious. But, Gordon thought, a sow’s ear with a ribbon around it was still a sow’s ear. Still… “Okay. You get into the ring. I’m staying out.”

“Hey, thanks.” Suddenly Saul was shaking his head. “I appreciate that. I really do. It’s a great break.”

“Yeah,” Gordon said. But he felt no elation.

•  •  •

The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite came on as Gordon and Penny were finishing dinner. She had made a souffle and Gordon had uncorked a white Beaujolais; both were feeling quite flush. They moved into the living room to watch. Penny took off her blouse, revealing small well-shaped breasts with large nipples.

“How do you know it’ll be on?” she asked lazily.

“Saul called this afternoon. He did an interview in Boston this morning. The local CBS station did the work, but he said the national network picked it up. Maybe there isn’t much else going on.” He glanced around to be sure the curtains were drawn.

“Ummm. Looks that way.” There was one big story—the nuclear powered submarine Thresher had gone down in the Atlantic without a single cry for help. They had been on a test dive. The Navy said that probably a system failure created progressive flooding. The interference with electrical circuits caused loss of power and the sub plunged to deeper waters, finally imploding. There were 129 men aboard.

Other than this depressing news there was very little. A follow-up on the Mona Lisa exhibit which toured New York and Washington, D.C. A preview of the launch of Major L. Gordon Cooper, Jr., who was to be launched on a 22-orbit, two-day trip around the earth in Faith 7, the final flight of Project Mercury. A statement by the White House that aid to South Vietnam would continue and that the war might be won by the end of 1965 if the political crisis there did not significantly affect the military effort. Generals grinned at the camera, promising a firm effort by the ARVN and a short mop-up operation in the delta region. In New York, efforts to save Pennsylvania Station had failed, and the classic edifice began to fall to the wrecker’s ball to make way for the new Madison Square Garden. The Pan Am Building, dedicated a month earlier, seemed the wave of the urban-blighted future. On camera, a critic decried the fall of Perm Station and declared the Pan Am an architectural atrocity, contributing to congestion in an already crowded area. Gordon agreed. The critic closed with a wistful remark that meeting beneath the clock at the Biltmore hotel, just across the street from the Pan Am, wasn’t going to be much of a joy any more. Gordon laughed to himself without quite understanding why. His sympathies suddenly reversed. He had never met a girl at the Biltmore; that was the sort of empty WASP ritual open to Yalies and kids who identified with The Catcher in the Rye. That wasn’t his world and never had been. “If that’s the past, fuck it,” he muttered under his breath. Penny gave him a questioning glance but said nothing. He grunted impatiently. Maybe the wine was getting to him.

Then Saul came on.

“From Yale University this evening, a startling announcement,” Cronkite began. “Professor Saul Shriffer, an astrophysicist, says that there is a possibility that recent experiments have detected a message from a civilization beyond our Earth.”

They switched to a shot of Saul pointing to a speck on a star chart. “The signals appear to come from the star 99 Hercules, similar to our own sun. 99 Hercules is 51 light years away. A light year is the distance—”

“They’re giving it so much time” Penny said wonderingly.

“Shhh!”

“—light travels in a year, at a speed of 186,000 miles per second.” A shot of Saul standing beside a small telescope. “The possible message was detected in a way astronomers had not anticipated—in an experiment by Professor Gordon Bernstein—”

“Oh, Jesus,” Gordon groaned.

“—at the University of California at La Jolla. The experiment involved a low-temperature measurement of how atoms line up in a magnetic field. The Bernstein experiments are still being studied—it is not certain that they are, in fact, picking up some signal from a distant civilization. But Professor Shriffer, a collaborator with Bernstein who broke the code in the signal, says he wants to alert the scientific community.” A picture of Saul writing equations at the blackboard. “There is a puzzling part of the message. A picture—”

A well-drawn version of the interweaving curves. Saul stood in front of it, speaking into a hand-held microphone. “Understand,” he said, “we make no specific claims at this time. But we would like the help of the scientific community in unraveling what this might mean.” Some brief talk about the decoding followed.

Back to Cronkite. “Several astronomers CBS News asked today for opinions expressed skepticism. If Professor Shriffer proves correct, though, it could mean very big news, indeed,” Cronkite made his reassuring smile. “And that’s the way it is, April the twelfth—”

Gordon clicked Cronkite off. “Goddamn,” he said, still stunned.

“I thought it was very well done,” Penny said judiciously.

“Well done? He wasn’t supposed to use my name at all!”

“Why, don’t you want any credit?”

“Credit? Christ—!” Gordon slammed a fist against the gray plaster wall with a resounding thump. “He did it all wrong, don’t you see that? I had this sinking feeling when he told me, and sure enough—there’s my name, tied to his crackpot theory!”

“But it’s your measurement—”

“I told him, keep my name out”

“Well, it was Walter Cronkite who gave your name. Not Saul.”

“Who cares who said it? I’m in it with Saul, now.”

“Why didn’t they have you on TV?” Penny asked innocently, clearly unable to see what all the fuss was about. “It was just a lot of pictures of Saul.”

Gordon grimaced. “That’s his strong suit. Simplify science down to a few sentences, screw it up any way you want, pander to the lowest common denominator—but be sure Saul Shriffer’s name is in lights. Big, gaudy, neon lights. Crap. Just—”

“He sort of hogged the credit, didn’t he?”

Gordon looked at her, puzzled. “Credit… ?” He stopped pacing the room. He saw that she honestly thought his anger was over not getting his face on TV. “Good grief.” He felt suddenly hot and flushed. He began unbuttoning his blue broadcloth shirt and thought about what to do. No point in talking to Penny—she was light years away from understanding how scientists felt about something like this.

He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, puffing, and walking into the kitchen, where the telephone was.

•  •  •

Gordon began with, “Saul, I’m mad as hell.”

“Ah…” Gordon could picture Saul selecting just the right words. He was good at that, but it wasn’t going to do him any good this time. “Well, I know now you feel, Gordon, I really do, I saw the network show two hours ago and it was just as much a surprise to me as it was to you. The local Boston footage was clean, no mention of your name explicitly, the way you wanted it. I called them right away after I saw the Cronkite thing and they said it got all changed around up at the network level.”

“How did the network people know, Saul, if you didn’t—”

“Well, look, I had to tell the local people. For background info, y’know.”

“You said it wouldn’t get on.”

“I did what I could, Gordon. I was going to call you.”

“Why didn’t you? Why let me see it without—”

“I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind so much, after seeing how much time we got.” Saul’s voice changed