“Glad to hear you say so!” Bernard was suddenly jovial. “I spotted it as a, well, Saul is given to excess in this sort of thing, you know.” He peered at Gordon for confirmation.
“Sometimes.”
“Couldn’t imagine anything more unlikely, myself—nuclear magnetic resonance experiments, he said? Bloody odd way to communicate.”
“Saul thinks part of it, ah, the message, is astronomical coordinates. You’ll remember when I came to you —”
“That’s the basis of it, then? Merely some coordinates?”
“Well, he did break down the pulses into that picture,” Gordon admitted lamely.
“Oh, that. Looks for all the world like a child’s scrawling to me.”
“No, there’s structure there. As for the content, we don’t—”
“I think you have to be careful in this, Gaw-dun. Understand, I
Bernard nodded seriously and peered down at his feet. Gordon wondered what to say. Bernard had a gravity about him that warded off direct contradiction. He carried his excess weight with an aggressive energy that seemed to dare anyone to make anything of it. He was short with the kind of barrel chest which, when he relaxed, would suddenly reveal itself to be merely an elevated stomach, held aloft with resolve. It sagged now as Gordon watched; Bernard had forgotten it in his concentration on the sins of Shriffer. His herringbone jacket bulged, the buttons strained. Gordon imagined he could hear Bernard’s belt creak with the sudden new pressure. This torture of his wardrobe was redeemed by the unconscious flush of pleasure which spread across Bernard’s serious face as his belly descended.
“It puts a black eye on the whole game, you know,” Bernard said abruptly, looking up. “Black eye.”
“I think until we get to the bottom—”
“The bottom is that Shriffer’s foxed you in with him, Gaw-dun. I’m sure none of it was your idea. I’m sorry our department has to be mixed in with his foolery. You’ll put paid to it, if you’re wise.”
This advice delivered, Bernard nodded and walked on.
Cooper glanced up as Gordon came into the laboratory. “Mornin’, how are you?” Cooper said.
Gordon reflected sourly that people routinely asked you how you were, as a formal greeting, when in fact they had not the slightest interest. “I feel like crap on a soda cracker,” Gordon muttered. Cooper frowned, puzzled. “You saw the TV last night?” Gordon asked.
Cooper pursed his lips. “Yes,” he said, as though he were giving a good deal away.
“I didn’t mean to let it get out of our hands like that. Shriffer took the ball and ran with it.”
“Well, maybe he scored a touchdown.”
“You think so?”
“No,” Cooper admitted. He leaned over and adjusted a setting on an oscilloscope, rather obviously having said all he wanted to. Gordon shrugged his shoulders as though they had weights attached. He would not try to puncture Cooper’s blithe goyische brass, so Well concealed beneath the cloak of unconcern.
“Any new data?” Gordon asked, cramming his fists into his pants pockets and pacing around the lab, inspecting, feeling a certain private pleasure at the thought that here, at least, he knew what was happening and what mattered.
“I’ve got some good resonance lines. I’m carrying on with the measurements we agreed I should make.”
“Ah, good.”
Gordon paced some more, checking the instruments. The nitrogen dewar popped with its brittle cold, transformers hummed, pumps chugged bovinely. Gordon read through Cooper’s lab notebook, looking for possible sources of error. He wrote out from memory the simple theoretical expressions which Cooper’s data should confirm. The numbers fell reassuringly close to the theoretical mark. Beside Cooper’s schoolboy neatness Gordon’s sprawling handwriting seemed a raffishly human intrusion on the neat, remorseless rectangularity of the gridded pages. Cooper worked in precise ballpoint; Gordon used a Parker fountain pen, even for quick calculations such as this. He preferred the elegant slick slide and sudden choking death of pens, and the touch of importance their broad blue lines gave to a page. One of the reasons he had switched from white shirts to blue was the doomed hope that ink stains on the left breast pocket would be easier to conceal.
Working this way, standing up amid the careless tangle of the ongoing experiment and scribbling in a notebook, calmed him. For a moment he was again back at Columbia, a son of Israel loyal to Newton’s cause. But then he had checked the last of Cooper’s numbers and there was nothing more to do. The moment passed. He sank back into the world.
“Do you have the summary I asked you to write up for your candidacy exam?” he asked Cooper.
“Oh, yeah. Almost done. I’ll get it to you tomorrow.”
“Good. Good.” He hesitated, not wanting to leave. “Say, ah—you haven’t got anything but conventional resonance curves? No—”
“Message?” Cooper smiled very slightly. “No, no message.”
Gordon nodded, looked around absently, and left.
He did not return to his office, but instead took as roundabout route to the Physical Sciences Library. It was on the ground floor of Building B and had a diffused, temporary air. Everything at UCLJ felt that way, compared to Columbia’s hallowed corridors, and now there was talk that even the campus name would change. La Jolla was being annexed by the jumble of San Diego. The city council spoke of the savings in fire and police protection, but to Gordon it seemed one more step in the steady homogenizing, the Losangelization of what had before been pleasant and charming distinctions. So UCLJ would become UCSD and something more than a mere name would be lost.
He spent an hour browsing through the new crop of physics journals and then looked up a few references relating to a back-burner idea he had let fall by the wayside. After a while he had no more real business and lunch was still an hour away. Somewhat reluctantly he returned to his office, not going up to the third floor to collect the morning mail but instead walking between the Physics and Chemistry buildings, passing under the architect’s wet dream of a connecting bridge. The graceful pattern of linked hexagons caught the eye, he had to give it that. Somehow, though, it looked uncomfortably like the scaffolding for some enormous insect’s burrow, a design pattern for a future wasp nest.
He was unsurprised to see his office door open, for he usually left it that way. The one distinction he had noted in the behavior pattern of humanists vs. scientists was the matter of doors: humanists closed them, discouraging casual encounters. Gordon wondered if this had a deep psychological significance, or, more likely, was meant by the humanists to conceal when they were on campus. As nearly as Gordon could tell, the answer was: seldom. They all seemed to work at home.
Isaac Lakin was standing in Gordon’s office, back to the door, studying the wasp’s scaffolding that loomed above. “Oh, Gordon,” he murmured, turning, “I’ve been looking for you.”
“I can imagine why.”
Lakin sat on the edge of Gordon’s desk; Gordon remained standing. “Oh?”
“The Shriffer thing.”
“Yes.” Lakin gazed up at the fluorescents and pursed his lips, as though carefully selecting the right words.
“It got out of hand,” Gordon said helpfully.
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
“Shriffer said he would keep me and UCLJ out of the news. The sole aim was to circulate that drawing.”
“Well, it’s done more than that.”
“How so?”
“I’ve had a number of calls. So would you, if you stayed in your office.”
