had put there while he was outlining his paper. Gordon tried to follow the argument the twin was making. “Careful of that stuff I have written there.” The twin frowned at Gordon’s intruding lines. “Okay,” he said democratically, and began to write around them. Gordon focused his attention on the rapid-fire sentences about Bessel’s functions and boundary conditions on the electric field. It took him five minutes to straighten out the twin’s misconception. All through it he was never sure which one of the twins he was talking to. They were virtually carbon copies. As soon as one finished the other would leap to the attack with a new objection, usually phrased in a cryptic few words. Gordon found them exceptionally tiring. After ten more minutes, during which they began to interrogate him about his research and how much money a research assistant made, he finally got rid of them by pleading a headache. That, plus three significant glances at his watch, got them out the door. As he was closing it, another voice called, “Wait a sec! Dr. Bernstein!”
Gordon reluctantly opened it. The man from UPI stepped partway in. “I know you don’t want to be bothered, Professor—”
“Right. So why are you bothering me?”
“Because Professor Ramsey blew the story to me, just now. That’s why.”
“What story?”
“About you and those chain molecules. Where you got the picture in the first place. How you wanted it kept secret. I’ve got it all, the works.” The man beamed at him.
“Why did Ramsey tell you?”
“I worked out some of it. He didn’t paper over the seams in his story very well. Not a very good liar, Ramsey.”
“I suppose not.”
“He wasn’t going to tell me anything. But I remembered that thing you were involved in a while back.”
Gordon said with sudden fatigue, “Saul Shriffer.”
“Yeah, he’s the guy. Me, I put two and two together. I went to see Ramsey for some more backgrounding and in the middle of it I popped him with that one.”
“And he babbled like a brook.”
“You got it.”
Gordon sagged into his chair. He sat there, slumped down, staring at the man from United Press International.
“Well?” the man said. He took out a notebook. “You going to tell me, Professor?”
“I don’t appreciate being grilled.”
“Sorry if I offended you, Professor. I’m not grilling you. I just did a little sniffing around and—”
“Okay, okay, I’m sensitive about that.”
“It’s going to come out sometime, you know. The Ramsey-Hussinger thing hasn’t got any real attention in the papers so far, I know. But it’s going to be important. People are going to hear about it. Your part could be valuable.”
In a dreamy way Gordon began to laugh softly. “Could be valuable…” he said, and laughed again.
The man frowned. “Hey, look, you are going to tell me, aren’t you?”
Gordon felt an odd, seeping tiredness in himself. He sighed. “I… I suppose I am.”
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
GORDON HAD NOT REALIZED THE LIGHTS WOULD BE so bright. There were banks of lamps to both sides of the small platform, to make his face shadow-free. A TV camera snout peered at him, an unwinking Cyclops. There were some chemists in the audience, and nearly all the Physics Department. The department draftsman had labored until midnight to get all the charts drawn. Gordon had found the staff a great help in hustling things together for this. He was beginning to realize that the hostility he had felt from them all was an illusion, a product of his own doubts. The last few days had been a revelation. Department members hailed him in the hall, listened intently to his descriptions of his data, and visited the lab.
He looked around for Penny. There—near the back, in a pink dress. She smiled wanly at his hand wave. The press men were murmuring to each other and finding seats. The TV crewmen were in place and a woman with a microphone gave lastminute instructions. Gordon counted the crowd. Incredibly, it was larger than the number who turned out for Maria Mayer’s Nobel conference. But then, this one had a day or two of lead time. The UPI man got his exclusive story—picked up by the other wire services—and then the University had stepped in and set up this dog and pony show.
Gordon riffled through his notes with damp fingers. He had not really wanted any of this. The feel of it seemed somehow wrong to him—science carried on in public, science elbowing for time on the 6 o’clock news, science as a commodity. The momentum of it was immense. In the end there would remain the article in
“Dr. Bernstein? We’re ready.”
He wiped his brow one last time. “Okay, shoot.” A green light winked on.
He looked into the camera and tried to smile.
CHAPTER FORTY THREE
PETERSON PULLED THE CAR INTO THE BRICK GARAGE and hauled out the suitcases. Puffing, he set them outside, on the path to the farmhouse. The garage doors locked with a reassuring
No sign of movement from the house. Probably no one had heard the car’s quiet purr. He decided to take a walk round, to survey and stretch his legs. His head buzzed. He needed the air. He had stayed in a Cambridge hotel overnight, when the sudden sinking feeling came over him again. He slept through most of the morning, and came down expecting lunch. The hotel was deserted. So were the streets outside. There were signs of life in the houses nearby, chimney smoke and an orange glow of lamps. Peterson did not stop to inquire. He drove out of a bleak and empty Cambridge and up through the flat, somber fen country.
He rubbed his hands together, more in satisfaction than to keep them warm. For a while there, when the illness first struck him again outside London, he had thought he would never make it this far. The roads had been clogged on the way from London, and then, next day, north of Cambridge, strangely empty. He had seen overturned lorries and burning barns north of Bury St. Edmunds. By Stowmarket a gang tried to hail him down. They had axes and hoes. He had ploughed straight through them, sending bodies into the air like bowling pins.
But here the farm lay quiet beneath the rolling gray clouds of East Anglia. Ranks of leafless trees marked the field boundaries. Black blobs hung in the latticework of bare twigs, rooks’ nests framed against the sky. He tramped through the western field, legs weak, the black mud sticking to his boots. To his right, cows stood patiently by a gate, their breath steaming in the air, waiting to be led home to their shed. The harvest had been cut two weeks ago—he’d ordered that. The fields stood wide and empty now. Let them lie; there was time.
He circled round through the sugar beet acres to the old stone house. It looked deceptively run down. The only visible new note was a glass conservatory jutting to the south. The panes had cross-hatchings of wire imbedded, quite secure. Years ago, when he’d first begun, he’d decided on a system totally buried, completely isolated. The greenhouse had filtered water and fertilizers. Water tanks under the northern field held a year’s supply. The greenhouse could produce a reasonable supply of vegetables for a long time. That, and the stores buried under the house and barn, would provide ample backup.
