“You can have all the time to work on it you want.”
“Fine.” Ramsey held out his hand as though a deal had just been concluded. “I’ll be in touch.”
Gordon shook the hand solemnly.
The bit of playacting with Ramsey had bothered him at first, but he realized it was part of dealing with people: you had to adopt their voice, see things from their point of view, if you wanted to communicate at all. Ramsey saw all this as a game with the first message as privileged information, and Shriffer as simply an interloper. Well, for the purposes of Ramsey’s universe, so be it. At one time when he was younger Gordon would have been rudely cynical about striking a stance purely to convince someone. Now matters seemed different. He wasn’t lying to Ramsey. He wasn’t withholding information. He was merely tailoring the way he described the events. Adolescent cliches about truth and beauty and bird thou never wert were just crap, simplistic categories. When you had to get something done you talked the talk. That was the way it was. Ramsey would keep on with the experiments without fretting over unknowables, and, with luck, they might find out something.
He was walking away from the Physics building, toward Torrey Pines Road where his Chevy was parked, when a slight figure raised a hand in salutation. Gordon turned and recognized Maria Goeppert Mayer, the only woman in the department. She had suffered a stroke some time before and now appeared seldom, moving ghostlike through the hallways, one side partially impaired, her speech slurred. Her face sagged and she seemed tired, but in the eyes Gordon could see a dancing intelligence that let nothing slip by.
“Do you believe your… re… results?” she asked.
Gordon hesitated. Under her penetrating gaze he felt himself beneath the microscope of history; this woman had come out of Poland, passed through the war years, worked on the separation of uranium isotopes for the Manhattan Project at Columbia, done research with Fermi just before cancer caught him. She had come through all that and more: her husband, Joe, was a brilliant chemist and held a full professorship at Chicago, while she was denied a faculty position and had to be content with a research associate position. He wondered suddenly if she had been irritated at that while she did the work on the shell model of the nucleus that made her famous. Compared to what she faced, his troubles were nothing. He bit his lip.
“Yes. Yes, I think so. Something… something is trying to reach us. I don’t know what.”
She nodded. There was a serene confidence in the way she did it, despite her numbed side, that clutched at something in Gordon. He blinked in sunset’s lancing light, and the glow turned to warm water in his eyes. “Good. Good,” she murmured with a halting tongue, and moved away, still smiling at him.
He arrived home just after Penny, and found her changing clothes. He dumped his briefcase, carrying the cares of the day, into a corner. “Where to?” he asked.
“Surf’s up.”
“Christ, it’s getting dark.”
“Waves don’t know that.”
He sagged against the wall. Her energy staggered him. This was the facet of California he found hardest: the sheer physicality of it, the momentum.
“Come with me,” she said, pulling on a French bikini brief and a T-shirt. “I’ll show you how. You can body surf.”
“Uh,” he said, not wanting to mention that he had looked forward to a glass of white wine and the evening news. After all, he thought—and suddenly not quite liking the thought—there might be a followup on the Shriffer story.
“Come
At Windansea Beach he watched her carve a path down the slope of a descending wave and wondered at it: a frail girl, mastering a blunt board and harnessing the blind momentum of the ocean, suspended in air as though by some miracle of Newtonian dynamics. It seemed a liquid mystery, and yet he felt he should be unsurprised; it was, after all, classical dynamics. The gang from around the pump house was out in full force, riding their boards as they awaited the perfect oncoming toppling ton of water, brown bodies deft on the white boards. Gordon sweated through the remorseless routine of the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises, assuring himself that this was just as good as the obvious pleasure the surfers took in their splitting of the waves. The required situps and pushups done, he ran over the swaths of sand, puffing to himself and in a muzzy way trying to unscramble the events of the day. They refused his simple tug: the day would not break down into simple paradigm. He halted, gasping in the salt air, eyebrows dark and beaded with sweat. Penny walked forward on her board, perched in the thick air, and waved to him. Behind her the ocean cupped itself upright and caught her board in a smooth hand, tilting it forward. She teetered, wobbled, arms fanned the air: she fell. The soapy churn engulfed her. The slick white board tumbled forward, end over end, driven by momentum’s grasp. Penny’s head appeared, hair plastered like a cap to her head, blinking, teeth white and bared. She laughed.
As they dressed he said, “What’s for supper?”
“Whatever you want.”
“Artichoke salad, then pheasant, then a brandy trifle.”
“I hope you can make all that.”
“Okay, what do
“I’m going out. I’m not hungry.”
“Huh?” A dull dawning of surprise.
“I’m going to a meeting.”
“What for?”
“A meeting. A rally, I guess.”
“For what?” he persisted.
“For Goldwater.”
“You may have heard of him. He’s running for President.”
“You’re kidding.” He stopped, foot in midair, halfway into his jockey shorts. Then, realizing how comical he must look, he stepped in and pulled them up. “He’s a simple-minded—”
“Babbitt?”
No, Sinclair Lewis wouldn’t have occurred to him. “Just leave it at simple-minded.”
“Ever read
“No, I didn’t. But look, when you have Kennedy, with the test ban treaty and some really
“Plus the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, that pig-eyed little brother of his—”
“Oh, come on. Goldwater is just a pawn of big business.”
“He’ll stand up to the communists.”
Gordon sat down on their bed. “You don’t
Penny wrinkled her nose, a gesture Gordon knew meant her mind was set. “Who sent our men into South Vietnam? What about what happened to Cliff and Bernie?”
“If Goldwater gets in there’ll be a million Cliffs and Bernies over there.”
“Goldwater will
“Penny, the thing to do over there is
“All I know is, friends of mine are getting killed.”
“And Big Barry will change all that.”
“Sure. I think he’s solid. He’ll stop socialism in our country.”
Gordon lay back on the bed, spouting a resigned
“I’m late already. Linda invited me to this cocktail party for Goldwater, and I’m going. You want to go?”
“Good God, no.”
