Timescape

“I looked up a Dobson poem today, thinking about you.” She took a paper from her books and handed it to him.

Time goes, you say? Ah, no!

Alas, time stays, we go.

He laughed. “Yeah, something like that.” He cut into a frankfurter with enthusiasm.

“Do you think people like Lakin are going to keep on questioning your work?”

He chewed judiciously. “Well, in the best sense, I hope they do. Every result in science has to stand up to criticism every day. Results have to be checked and rethought.”

“No, I meant—”

“I know, are they going to try to cut me off at the knees. I hope so.” He grinned. “If they push things further than legitimate scientific skepticism, they’ll have just that much farther to fall.”

“Well, I hope not.”

“Why?”

“Because—” her voice broke—“it’ll be hard on you, and I can’t take what it does to you any more.”

“Honey…”

“I can’t. You’ve been tight as a drum all summer and fall. And when I try to deal with it, I can’t get through to you and I start snapping at you and…”

“Honey…”

“Things get so impossible. I just…”

“God, I know. It runs away with me.”

She said quietly, “And me…”

“I start thinking about a problem and other things, other people, they just seem to get in the way.”

“It’s been my fault, too. I want a lot out of this, out of us, so much, and I’m not getting it.”

“We’ve been clawing at each other.”

She sighed. “Yeah.”

“I… I think the physics stuff isn’t going to be so bad from now on.”

“That… that’s what I hope. I mean, these last few days, they’ve been different. Better. It feels like a year ago, really. You’re relaxed, I’m not bugging you all the time to… I feel better about us. For the first time in ages.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” He smiled tentatively.

They ate in a comfortable silence. In the moist sunset glow Penny swirled her glass of white wine and gazed at the ceiling, thinking. Gordon knew they had made an unspoken pledge.

Penny began to smile, her eyes hazed. She sipped more of the amber wine and plunged a fork into a frankfurter. Holding it aloft with a wise smile, she turned it this way and that, studying it critically. “Yours is bigger than this,” she said judicially.

Gordon nodded solemnly. “Maybe. That’s, what, about thirty centimeters? Yeah, I can beat that.”

“In matters of this kind, the preferred unit system is inches. It’s sort of traditional.”

“So it is.”

“Not that I’m a purist, you understand.”

“Oh no, I wouldn’t think that.”

•  •  •

He awoke with an arm that had gone to sleep. He gently rolled her head off his bicep and lay still, feeling the tingling’ ebb away. Outside, the balmy fall night had descended. He sat up slowly and she snuggled to him, murmuring. He studied the rounded knuckles of her curved spine, knobbed hills amid the brown sweep of skin. He thought of time that could flow and loop back on itself, unlike any river, and his eyes followed the narrowing of her back. Then came the flaring into hips, a complex of smooth surfaces descending to the ripe swelling below, the tan fading into a startling pure white. Drowsy, she had solemnly informed him that Lawrence had called his a pillar of blood, a phrase that struck her as grotesque. But on the other hand, she added, it was sort of like that, wasn’t it? “All in pursuit of la petite mort,” she murmured, and slid into sleep. Gordon knew she had been right about the tension between them. It was seeping away now. He saw that he had loved her all along, but there had been so much in the way…

He heard a distant siren. Something made him slowly untangle himself from her. He moved across the cold floor to the window. He could see people walking along La Jolla Boulevard under a bleached neon glow. A motorcycle cop raced by. The police here were jackbooted and military, with eggshell helmets, goggles, their square faces a frozen blank, like actors in a futuristic anticipation, a B-grade black and white. In New York the cops were soft, their uniforms a worn, neighborhood blue. The siren shrieked. A police car flashed by. Buildings, palms, turning heads, shops and signs—all pulsed red in response to the revolving hysterical light atop the streaking car. Fragments of red ricocheted from store windows. Kinetic confusion swept by, wailing, its mechanical mouth announcing tumult. The Doppler death of this shriek stirred pedestrians, filling their steps with new energy. Heads pivoted to seek the crime or fire that had drawn the bulletlike car. Gordon thought of the messages and the thin thread of desperation that ran through them. A siren. It had come in speckled dabs, impulses, light reflected from random waves, visions from far across a river. It should be answered. For scientific reasons, yes, but for more than that.

•  •  •

“Uh, you busy?”

It was Cooper. “No, come on in.” Gordon pushed the pile of papers he was grading to the corner of his desk. Then he leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on top of them. He clasped his hands behind his neck, elbows out, and grinned. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, I’m gonna take my exam again in three weeks, y’know. What do I say about those interruptions? I mean, Lakin and the others came down on me like a shitload of bricks last time.”

“Right. If I were you, I would ignore the point.”

“But I can’t They’ll cream me again.”

“I’ll take care of them.”

“Huh? How?”

“I’ll have a little work of my own to present, by that time.”

“Well, I dunno… Getting Lakin off my back is nontrivial. You saw the way he—”

“Why do you say ‘nontrivial’? Why not ‘hard’ or ‘difficult’?”

“Well, you know, it’s physics talk…”

“Yes, ‘physics talk,’ We have a lot of jargon like that. I wonder if sometimes it doesn’t disguise things, rather than making them clearer.”

Cooper gave Gordon an odd look. “I guess.”

“Don’t look so uncertain,” Gordon said jovially. “You’re home free. I’m going to save your ass.”

“Uh, okay.” Cooper moved uncertainly to the door. “If you say so…”

“See you on the ramparts,” Gordon said by way of dismissal.

•  •  •

He was about a quarter of the way through the first draft of his paper for Science when there was a knock on his door. He had decided on Science because it was big and prestigious and got things into print fairly quickly. They carried long articles, so he could tell the whole thing in one piece, stacking up the evidence in a pile so high no one could knock it down. He had already checked with Claudia Zinnes. She would publish a letter in the same issue, confirming some or his observations.

“Hello. Can we come in?” It was the twins, first-year graduate students.

“Well, look, I’m pretty busy—”

“It’s your office hours.”

“It is? Oh yes. Well, what did you want?”

“You graded some of our problems wrong,” one of them said. The flat statement took Gordon aback. He was used to a little more humility from students. “Oh?” he countered.

“Yeah. Look—” One of them began to write rapidly on Gordon’s blackboard, covering up some notes Gordon