airy mirth. He had learned a lot about the huge Country beyond Washington, most of it from Penny. Their mutual abrasions had healed over in the aftermath of 1963 and they had found again the persistent chemistry that had first drawn them into their mutual bound orbits, circles centered on a point midway between them. The thing between them was not a geometric dot but rather a small sun, igniting between them a passion Gordon felt was deeper than anything that had happened to him before. They were married in late 1964. Her father, just plain Jack, put on a massive wedding, glittery and champagne-steeped. Penny wore the traditional white. She made a downward- turning leer whenever anyone mentioned it. She had come with him to Washington that winter, when he was making his first big presentation to the NSF for a major grant of his own. His talk went well and Penny fell in love with the National Gallery, going every day to see the Vermeers. Together they ate shellfish with luminaries from the NSF and strolled down from the Congressional dome to the Lincoln Monument. They did not mind the raw, cold damp then; it went with the scenery. Everything had seemed to go with everything else.
Gordon checked the address and found that he had another block to go. He had always been intrigued by the contrasts of Washington. This busy street brimmed with its own importance, yet intersecting it were thinner avenues of small shops, decaying houses, and corner grocery stores. Old black men leaned in doorways, their large brown eyes surveying the tax-funded bustle. Gordon waved to one and, turning a corner, discovered a mammoth courtyard. It had the austere French style of 1950s Government Classical, with conical evergreens standing like sentries at the abrupt, uncompromising corners. Regimented bushes led the eye, willing or not, into remorseless perspectives.
Well, he thought, blocky and self-important architecture or no, this was it. He teetered back on his heels to look. Granite facings led upward into a bland sky. He took his hands out of his pockets and brushed hair back from his eyes. Already there was the giveaway thinning of the crown, he knew, sure sign that his father’s baldness would find echo in his own forties.
He pushed open a series of three glass doors. The spaces between seemed to serve as air locks, preserving inside a dry heat. Ahead were tables with luxuriant linen draped over them. In the center of the carpeted foyer, knots of suited men. Gordon pushed through the last air lock and into a hushed buzz of talk. Thick drapes swallowed sounds, giving the air a solemnity found in mortuaries. To the left, a band of receptionists. One detached herself and came toward him. She was wearing a long, cream-colored silky thing Gordon would have taken for an evening gown if it were not midday. She asked for his name. He gave it slowly. “Oh,” she said, eyes round, and went to one of the draped tables. She returned with a name tag, not the usual plastic, but a sturdy wooden frame housing a stark white board with his name in calligraphy. She pinned it on him. “We do want our guests to look their best today,” she said with abstract concern, and brushed imaginary lint from his coat sleeve. Gordon warmed at the attention and forgave her efficient gloss. Other men, all suited, most in basic bureaucratic black, were filling the foyer. The receptionists met them with a volley of name tags—plastic, he noted—and seating assignments and admission cards. In a corner a woman who looked like an executive secretary helped a frail white-haired man from his immense, weighty overcoat. He moved with delicate, hesitant gestures, and Gordon recognized him as Jules Chardaman, the nuclear physicist who had discovered some particle or other and received a Nobel for his trouble.
“Gordon! Tried to call you last night,” called a brisk voice behind him.
He turned, hesitated, and shook hands with Saul Shriffer. “I got in late and went out for a walk.”
“In this town?”
“It seemed safe.”
Saul shook his head. “Maybe they don’t mug dreamers.”
“I probably don’t look prosperous enough.”
Saul flashed his nationally known smile. “Naw, you’re looking great. Hey, how’s the wife? She with you?”
“Oh, she’s fine. She’s been visiting her parents—you know, showing off the kids. She’s flying in this morning, though.” He glanced at his watch. “Should be here soon.”
“Hey, great, like to see her again. How about dinner tonight?”
“Sorry, we’ve got plans.” Gordon realized he had said this too quickly and added, “Maybe tomorrow, though. How long will you be in town?”
“I have to zip over to New York by noon. I’ll catch you next time I’m on the coast.”
“Fine.”
Saul unconsciously pursed his lips, as though considering how to put his next sentence. “You know, those parts of the old messages you kept to yourself…”
Gordon kept his face blank. “Just the names, that’s all. My public statement is that they were lost in the noise. Which is partly true.”
“Yeah.” Saul studied his face. “Look, after all this much time, it seems to me—look, it would make a really interesting sidelight on the whole thing.”
“No. Come on, Saul, we’ve had this discussion before.”
“It’s been
“I’m not sure I got the names right. A letter here and there and you’ve got the wrong name and the wrong people.”
“But look—”
“Forget it. I’m never going to release the parts I’m not sure about.” Gordon smiled to take the edge off his voice. There are other reasons, too, but he wasn’t going to go into that.
Saul shrugged goodnaturedly and fingered his newly grown moustache. “Okay, okay. Just thought I’d give it a try, catch you in a mellow mood. How’re the experiments going?”
“We’re still hammering away at the sensitivity. You know how it is.”
“Getting any signals?”
“Can’t say. The hash is unbelievable.”
Saul frowned. “There should be something there.”
“Oh, there is.”
“No, I mean besides that stuff you got back in ’67. I’ll grant you that was a clear message. But it wasn’t in any code or language we know.”
“The universe is a big place.”
“You think they were from a long way off?”
“Look, anything I say is pure guess. But it was a strong signal, tightly beamed. We were able to show that the fact that it lasted three days and then shut off was due to the earth passing through a tachyon beam. I’d say we just got in the way of somebody else’s communications net.”
“Ummm.” Saul pondered this. “Y’know, if we could only be sure those messages we can’t decode weren’t from a human transmitter, far up in the future…”
Gordon grinned. Saul was one of the biggest names in science now, at least in the public eye. His popularizations made the bestseller lists, his television series ran in prime time. Gordon finished for him, “You mean, we’d have proof of an alien technology.”
“Sure. Worth trying, isn’t it?”
“Maybe so.”
The big bronze doors at the end of the foyer swung back. The crowd shuffled toward the reception room beyond. Gordon had noted that people in groups move as though by a slow diffusion process, and this mob was no different. Many he knew—Chet Manahan, a methodical solid state physicist who always wore a vest with matching tie, spoke five languages, and made sure you knew this within a few minutes of meeting him; Sidney Roman, a swarthy, delicate, thin man whose precise equations led to outrageous conclusions, some of which had proved right; Louisa Schwartz, who, contrary to her name, had luminous white skin and a mind that catalogued everything in astrophysics, including most of the unprintable gossip; George Maklin, red-faced and loud, shoulders rippling with muscle, who carried out experiments suspended by whiskers into liquid helium, measuring wisps of momentum; Douglas Karp, a czar of a rabble of graduate students which cranked out two papers a month on the band structure of assorted solids, enabling him to lecture in sunny summer schools in the Mediterranean; Brian Nantes, with enormous, booming energy which in his papers squeezed into adroit, laconic equations, denuded of commentary or argument with his contemporaries, with a decidedly pearls-before-swine abstract to accompany the text—and many more, some casually met at conferences, others opposed in heated sessions of APS meetings, most of them dim faces associated with the stutter of initials beneath interesting papers, or met at a sandwich-and-beer faculty lunch
