Timescape

died out a little, and people have stopped hooting with laughter at the very idea—well, it’ll make a good article. Maybe something for Science titled ‘Tilting at Orthodox Windmills,’ That might go over,”

“Uh huh.”

“Well, Alex and I have to be off. We’re going up through Escondido to Palomar.”

“Doing some observing there?” Gordon asked casually.

“No. No, I don’t do the observations, you know. I’m more an idea man. Alex wants to take some pictures, that’s all. It’s an awesome place.”

“Oh yes.”

In a moment they were gone and he could get back to his experiment.

•  •  •

The first day Gordon got the NMR rig back on the air there were signal-to-noise problems. On the second day stray leakage waves clouded the results. One of the indium antimonide samples acted funny and he had to cycle the rig down, dump the cold bath and pull the defective sample. That took hours. Only on the third day did the resonance curves begin to look right. They were reassuringly accurate. They fit theory quite well, within the crossbars of experimental error. Beautiful, Gordon thought. Beautiful and dull. He kept the rig running all day, in part to be sure the electronics stayed stable. He found he could take care of ordinary business—coaching Cooper; making up lecture notes for the coming semester; cutting the tiny gray indium antimonide bars on the hot-wire, oil-immersion setup—and duck into the lab for a quick NMR measurement every hour or two. He set-ed into a routine. Things got done. The curves remained normal.

•  •  •

“Professor Bernstein?” the woman said, her voice pitched high and grating. He wondered idly if her accent was midwestern. “Yes,” he said into the telephone.

“This is Adele Morrison with Senior Scholastic Magazine. We are doing a major piece on the, uh, claim you and Professor Shriffer have made. We are treating it as an example of controversy in science. I wondered—”

“Why?”

“Pardon?”

“Why bring it up? I’d prefer you just forgot about it.”

“Well, Professor Bernstein, I don’t know, I… Professor Shriffer was most cooperative. He said he thought our readership—which is high school seniors, you know—would learn a great deal from such a study.”

“I’m not so sure of that.”

“Well, Professor, I’m afraid I’m only an assistant editor here, I don’t make policy. I believe the article is—yes, here, it’s already in galley form. It’s mostly an interview with your colleague, Professor Shriffer.”

“Uh huh.”

The voice rose higher. “I was asked to see if you had any final comment on the, uh, status of the, uh, controversy. We could add it to the galleys now if—”

“No. Nothing to say.”

“You’re sure? The editor asked me to—”

“I’m sure. Let it go as is.”

“Well, all right. We have several other professors quoted in the article and they make some very critical comments. I thought you should know that.”

For a moment it tempted him. He could ask their names and listen to the quotations and frame some reply The woman was waiting, the phone spitting that faint hiss of long distance. He blinked. She was good; she’d almost hooked him into it. “No, they can say what they like. Let Saul carry this one.” He hung up. Let the scholastic seniors of this great nation think whatever they wanted. He only hoped the article wouldn’t increase the rate of crank visits.

•  •  •

The summer sun bleached everything into a flatness stripped of perspective. Penny came in from surfing and plopped down beside Gordon. “Too many wipeouts,” she explained. “Rip tide, too. Kept sucking me into the pilings.”

“Running is a lot safer,” he observed.

“And boring.”

“But not worthless.”

“Maybe. Oh, that reminds me—I’m going up to see my parents some time soon. I’d go before classes, but Dad is off on some business trip.”

“What reminded you of that?”

“Huh? Oh. Well, you said running wasn’t worthless, and I remembered that I had a student last semester who used the longest word in the English language, deliberately, in a paper I was grading. It’s ‘floccinaucinihilipilification.’ It means ‘the act of estimating as worthless.’”

“Um. Really.”

“Yeah, and I had to look the damn thing up. It isn’t in any American dictionary, but. I found it in the Oxford English.”

“And?”

“That’s the dictionary my Daddy gave me.”

Gordon smiled and lay back on the sand, hoisting an Esquire up to blot out the sun. “You’re a highly nonlinear lady.”

“Whatever that means.”

“It’s a compliment, believe me.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Do you want to go up to Oakland with me or not?”

“That’s what this is about?”

“Despite your attempts to avoid it, yes.”

“Attempts to—? Penny, you’ve been reading too much Kafka. Yes, sure, I’ll go.”

“When?”

“How should I know? It’s your trip, your parents.” She nodded. An odd, pinched expression appeared on her face, then vanished. Gordon wondered what she was feeling but he knew no simple way to ask. He opened his mouth to begin a fumbling approach, and then gave up. Was going to Oakland part of the courtship dance, taking the boy home to be viewed? Maybe that was only an east coast phenomenon; he wasn’t sure. After announcing that she didn’t want to marry him, and then staying on and living with him as though things would just keep going that way, Penny had become an utter mystery to him. Gordon sighed to himself, giving up on the whole subject.

He read for a few minutes and then said, “Hey, it says here the Test Ban Treaty is in effect.”

“Sure,” Penny murmured, rolling over from her drowsy sleep in the sun. “Kennedy signed it months ago.”

“I must’ve missed it.” Gordon thought of Dyson and Orion, a strangely appealing dream that was now dead. Nobody was going to get out to the planets right away; the space program would limp along on liquid fuel rockets. It struck Gordon that the times were pressing in now. New ideas and new people were coming into the old La Jolla of Chandler’s day. The same Kennedy who had pushed the Test Ban and killed Orion was also federalizing the Alabama National Guard, to stop George Wallace from using them against the desegregation program. Medgar Evers had been killed just a few months before. There was a feeling running through the country now, that things had to change.

Gordon tossed the magazine aside. He rolled over beneath the sun’s broiling and began to doze off. A sea breeze brought a sour reek of the rotting kelp bank farther down the beach. He wrinkled his nose. The hell with the press of the times. Politics is for the moment, Einstein said once. An equation is for eternity. If he had to choose sides, Gordon was on the side of the equations.

•  •  •

That evening he took Penny out to dinner and then dancing at the El Cortez. It wasn’t the sort of thing he usually did, but the strange, stretching tension between them needed attention. They talked during dinner. Over