Timescape

•  •  •

Gordon spent an afternoon with star charts, plotting the motion of the point in Hercules. It fell beneath the horizon for a good portion of the day. If there were tachyons—whatever that name meant—they would come directly, on a line between his NMR rig and Hercules. When the earth was between him and Hercules, the particles would probably be absorbed. That meant, to get any signal, he had to run when Hercules was up above the horizon.

“Claudia?”

“Yes, yes, I haven’t called you because we have not seen—”

“I know, I know. Look, those coordinates you and I got. They’re in the constellation Hercules. I think we might have more luck if we only observed at certain times, so—say, have you got a pencil? I just worked these out. I figure between 6 p.m. and—”

•  •  •

But neither Columbia nor La Jolla could pick up any effect at the times he calculated. Could there be some other interference? It would further complicate things, but what was the cause? Gordon went back and estimated the times when he or Cooper had recorded signals. Most of them matched times when Hercules was in the sky. In some cases, though, there was no record of when the observations were made. A few others seemed to correspond to times when Hercules was definitely below the horizon. Gordon had always liked Occam’s Razor: Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. It meant that the simplest theory which explained the data was the best. The interference theory was simple, but it had to take care of the times when Hercules was below the horizon, somehow. Maybe those points were mistakes, and maybe not. Rather than reach any conclusion, Gordon decided to keep trying and let the data sort themselves out.

•  •  •

Gordon had been teaching Classical Electricity and Magnetism, using the standard Jackson text, for only a few weeks. Already his lecture notes were running out and he was behind in grading the problem sets he assigned. The familiar blizzard of demands fell on him: committees; office hours with students; reading over Cooper’s work and talking to him about it; arranging seminars. The first-year graduate class looked good, as far as Gordon could tell from the problem sets they handed in. Burnett and More were sharp. The middle of the pack—Sweedler, Coon, Littenberg particularly—had promise. There were the twins from Oklahoma who did uneven work and had an irritating way of cross-examining him. Maybe he was a little touchy these days, but they —

“Hey, got a minute?”

Gordon looked up from his grading. It was Ramsey. “Sure.”

“Look, I wanted to talk to you about this press conference Hussinger and I are doing.”

“Press conference?”

“Yeah, we’re, ah, going to announce our conclusions. It looks pretty big.” Ramsey stood quietly by the doorway, without his usual animation.

“Well, good. Good.”

“We wanted to use that chain configuration I figured out. You know, the one I thought you and I would publish together.”

“You need to use that?”

“It makes the case stronger, yeah.”

“How will you explain where it comes from?”

Ramsey looked pained. “Yeah, that’s the catch, isn’t it? If I claim it’s from your experiments, some people are going to think the whole idea is bullshit.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“But still, look—” Ramsey spread his hands. “It makes the argument more convincing, to see the structure —”

“No.” Gordon shook his head vigorously. “I’m sure you’ll be believed, solely on the basis of the experiments. It’s not necessary to drag me into it.”

Ramsey looked doubtful. “It’s a nice piece of work, though.”

Gordon smiled. “Leave it out. Leave me out, okay?”

“If you say so, sure. Sure,” Ramsey said, and left.

•  •  •

To Gordon the conversation with Ramsey was amusing, a distant reminder of the real world. To Ramsey and Hussinger, publishing first was the crucial step. Holding a press conference put their seal on the work even more strongly. But Ramsey knew nothing would have happened without Gordon, and the thought bothered the man. Proper procedure was to first get Gordon’s consent to separate publication, and then to write a warm acknowledgment at the end of their paper. Gordon told Penny about the conversation that evening, and about how strange the whole process seemed to him now. It was getting the result that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure. People became scientists because they liked solving riddles, not because they would win prizes. Penny nodded, and remarked that she understood Lakin a little better. He was a man past the point of finding anything truly fundamental; scientific invention normally trickles away past the age of forty. So now Lakin clung to the accolades, the visible talismans of accomplishment. Gordon nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “Lakin’s an operator without real eigenvalues.” It was an obscure physicist’s joke, and Penny didn’t understand it, but Gordon laughed for the first time in days.

•  •  •

“Hey, gee, you’re still here?” Cooper said from the laboratory doorway.

Gordon looked up from an oscilloscope face. “Trying to take some new data, yeah.”

“Crap, it’s late. I mean, I just dropped in after a date to pick up some books and saw the light. You been here since I left for dinner?”

“Uh, yes. I got something out of the vending machines.”

“Geez, that’s terrible food.”

“Right,” Gordon said, turning back to the equipment.

Cooper ambled over and noticed the resonance traces scattered on the lab bench. “Looks like my stuff.”

“Close, yeah.”

“You’re doing indium antimonide? Y’know, Lakin asked me about your taking so much time on the rig here. Wants to know what you’re doin’.”

“Why doesn’t he come ask me?”

A shrug. “Look, I don’t want to get—”

“I know.”

After a few neutral comments, Cooper left. Gordon had been carrying out his normal duties for the last week and then spending the evenings taking data, listening, waiting. There were random yellow jitterings among the traces, but no signal. All eroded into noise. The pumps coughed, the electronics gear gave an occasional hot ping. Tachyons, he thought. Things faster than light. It made no sense. He had taken up the idea with Wong, the particle physicist, and got the conventional reply: they violated special relativity, and anyway, there was no evidence for them. Tachyons, gliding across the universe in less time than Gordon’s eye took to absorb a photon of the pale, watery laboratory light—these things went against reason.

Then there came a flutter of interrupted resonances. Gordon had worked out a faster way of compiling the curves and he could extract the Morse coded portions almost immediately.

THREATEN OCEAN

A few moments later, another sputter of interruptions:

CAMBRIDGE CAVENDISH LABO

and then a blur of noise. Gordon nodded to himself. He felt comfortable, working here alone, monklike. Penny didn’t like his long hours here, but that was a secondary issue. She didn’t understand that sometimes you had to press on, that the world would yield if you just kept at it.