Timescape

Wickham came down the steps of the porch. Renfrew slipped on the wet grass. “Christ!” The man picked up speed, looking back at Renfrew. Cathy Wickham, trying to make out the shadows on the lawn, stopped dead in the path. The figure smashed into her. They sprawled on the stones.

Markham swung the poker back and forth in front of him. The men seemed paralyzed by the sound of it. In the gloom they could not tell how close it came. Markham could not judge the distance either. Ignorant armies clash by night, he thought giddily. Should he charge them?

“Your friend’s bought his,” he called out clearly.

They both turned to look. The yellow rectangle of the doorway sent a blade of light out onto the glistening lawn. In the beam John Renfrew yanked the fallen man to his feet and said “What’re you—”

Markham stepped quietly forward and swung the poker crack into the nearest man’s leg.

“Awrrr!” The struck man collapsed. His partner saw Markham rearing up out of the shadows and backed away. Suddenly he turned and ran diagonally across the lawn. Markham tried to keep both men in sight. Two down, one to go.

“Look out, Greg, he’s got a knife!” Cathy Wickham shouted.

The man turned, transfixed by the yellow light in the center of the lawn. Metal glinted in his hand. “Naw, you just leave off,” he said roughly.

Markham walked towards him. Swoosh, swoosh. The sound caught the man’s attention. Ian Peterson came trotting forward. “Let him go,” he called to Markham.

“Hell no!” Markham answered with gusto.

“No point in risking—”

“We’ve got ’em,” Markham insisted.

“That one’s getting away!” Cathy Wickham cried. The man lying in the drive had moved at a crouch towards the gate. As she spoke he ran with a limp to the gate and vaulted over it.

“Damn!” Markham said with chagrin. “Should’ve covered him.”

“No need for melodramatics,” Peterson called mildly. “The police will be here shortly.” Markham glanced back at Renfrew.

“Eric!” the man with the knife shouted. “Switch!”

Abruptly, before Markham could understand the signal, the two men moved. Renfrew’s captive wrenched away from him and dashed back towards the garage. Markham followed. The man ran into the dark of the garage. Markham hesitated. He could see nothing. Suddenly the man reappeared, a shadow. Markham could make out that he had something long in his hand. Markham backed away warily. He saw the man with the knife moving towards the gate. An elementary maneuver to distract him. The shadow stepped further into the light and swung a rake at Markham’s head. Markham ducked and jumped backward. “Christ, somebody—” Both men suddenly ran for the gate. One turned and threw the rake directly at Markham. He dodged aside. “Bastards!” he shouted and hurled the poker after them into the darkness. He listened to their footsteps fade away.

“No use going after them,” Renfrew said at his side.

Cathy Wickham agreed, “Leave them to the police, Greg.”

“Yeah, okay,” he mumbled.

They trailed back into the house. There was a moment of silence and then everyone began chattering about the incident. Markham noted that those who had stayed inside and watched from the door had a different view of the details. They thought Renfrew had subdued his man, when in fact the fellow had simply been waiting for a proper opening for escape. The relativity of experience, Markham thought. He was still puffing from the exertion, adrenalin singing in him.

From the distance came the two-tone hooting of a siren.

“The police,” Peterson said swiftly. “Late, as usual. Look, I’m going to cut and run before they get here. I don’t want to have to answer questions for the rest of the night. You fellows are the heroes, anyway. Thanks for the drinks and goodbye, everyone.”

He left hastily. Markham watched him go. He reflected on the fact that their first unthinking response had been to assume the shadowy figures were thieves. There was no hesitation, no one suggesting it was some mistake, people who’d got the wrong house. Twenty years ago that might have been the case. Now…

The others, standing in the center of the living room, drank a toast to each other. The siren drew nearer.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

JULY, 1963

GORDON SAW THAT HE WOULD HAVE TO SPEND A LOT of the summer working with Cooper. The candidacy exam had been a blow. Cooper took weeks to recover his self-confidence. Gordon finally had to sit him down and give him a Dutch uncle talk. They decided on a routine. Cooper would study fundamentals each morning, to prepare for a second try at the exam. Afternoons and evenings he would take data. By autumn he would have enough to analyze in detail. By that time, with coaching from Gordon, Cooper could take the exam again with some confidence. With luck, winter would find him with most of his thesis data complete.

Cooper listened, nodded, said little. At times he seemed moody. His new data came out smooth, unblemished: no signals.

Gordon felt a letdown whenever he looked over Cooper’s lab books and saw the bland, ordinary curves. Could the effect come and go like that? Why? How? Or was Cooper simply discarding all the resonances which didn’t fit his thesis? If you were damned certain you weren’t looking for something, there was a very good chance you wouldn’t see it.

But Cooper kept everything in his notebooks, as a good experimenter should. The books were messy but they were always complete. Gordon thumbed through them daily, looking for unexplained blank spots or scratched-out entries. Nothing seemed wrong.

Still, he remembered the physicists in the 1930s who had bombarded substances with neutrons. They had carefully rigged their Geiger counters so that, once the neutron barrage stopped, the counters shut off, too—to avoid some sources of experimental error. If they had left the counters on they would have discovered that some substances emitted high-energy particles for a long time afterward—artificially induced radioactivity. By being careful they missed the unexpected, and lost a Nobel prize.

•  •  •

The July issue of Physics Today carried a piece in the Search and Discovery section dealing with spontaneous resonance. There was a sample of the data, taken from the Physical Review Letters paper. Lakin was quoted extensively. The effect, he said, “promises to show us a new kind of interaction which can occur in Type III-V compounds such as indium antimonide—and perhaps in all compounds, if the experiments are sensitive enough to pick up this effect.” There was no mention of the apparent correlations between the times when the spontaneous resonances appeared.

Gordon decided to attack the “spontaneous resonance” phenomenon afresh. The message idea made sense to him—at least, something was there—but the rebuffs from his colleagues could not be ignored. Okay, maybe they were right. Maybe a series of bizarre coincidences led him to believe there were coded words in the scope traces. In that case, what was the explanation? Lakin was afraid the concentration on the message idea would obscure the true problem. Okay, say Lakin was right. Say they were all right. What other explanation was possible?

He worked for several weeks on alternatives. The theory governing Cooper’s original experiment was not particularly deep; Gordon labored through it, pondering the assumptions, redoing the integrals, checking each step. Some fresh ideas cropped up. He studied each one in turn, running it to ground with equations and order-of- magnitude estimates. The earlier theory dropped some mathematical terms; he investigated them, looking for ways they could suddenly stop being negligible and upset the theory. Nothing seemed to fit his needs. He reread the original papers, hoping for an offhand clue. Pake, Korringa, Overhauser, Feher, Clark… the papers were classics,