Gregory Benford - Timescape

“Could I get a list of what they have?”

“I’m working on it. Listen, I must ring off. Wanted to let you know.”

“Right. Fine. And, and thanks!”

The news changed the tenor of the party. Heather and James knew nothing of John’s experiment, so there was much explaining to do before they could understand the import of the telephone call. Renfrew and Markham took turns explaining the basic idea, skipping over the complicated matter of Lorentz transformations and how tachyons could propagate backward in time; they would have needed a blackboard to make the attempt. Marjorie came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on an apron. The men’s voices were authoritative, booming in the small dining room. Candlelight bathed the faces around the table in a pale yellow glow. The women spoke with rising inflections, questioning.

“It seems strange to think of the people in one’s own past as real,” Marjorie said distantly. Heads turned towards her. “That is, to imagine them as, as still alive and changeable in some sense…”

The company sat silent for a moment. Several frowned. Marjorie’s way of putting the issue had caught them off balance. They had spoken often this evening of things changing in the future. To imagine the past as alive, too, as a moving and flexing thing—

The moment passed, and Marjorie returned to the kitchen. She came back with not one but three desserts. When she set them down, the pièce de resistance —a meringue confection with early raspberries and whipped cream—created the wave of ahs she had anticipated. She followed this in short order with pots of strawberry mousse and a large glass bowl of carefully decorated sherry trifle.

“Marjorie, you’re too much,” James protested.

John sat and beamed silently as the guests heaped praises on his wife. Even Jan managed two helpings, though she refused the trifle.

“I think,” Greg commented, “that sweets must be the English substitute for sex.”

After dessert the party moved near the fireplace as Greg and John cleared away the dessert plates. Marjorie felt a warm relaxation seeping through her as she brought in the tea things. The room had taken on a chill as darkness deepened; she added a small, glimmering candle heater to warm the cups. The fire crackled and shot an orange spark onto the worn carpet.

“I know coffee is supposed to be bad for you but I must say it goes better with liqueurs,” Marjorie observed. “Would anyone like some? We’ve got Drambuie, Cointreau, and Grand Marnier. Not homemade.”

She felt a relaxed sense of accomplishment now that the meal was over. Her duties ended with handing out the cups. Outside, a wind was getting up. The curtains were open and she could see the silhouetted pine branches tossing outside the windows. The living room was an oasis of light and peace and stability.

As if reading her thoughts, Jan quoted softly: “Stands the church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?”

They all exaggerated, Marjorie thought, especially the press. History was a series of crises, after all, and they’d all survived so far. John worried about it, she knew, but really, things hadn’t changed all that much.

GORDON BERNSTEIN PUT DOWN HIS PENCIL WITH DELIBERATE slowness. He held it between thumb and forefinger and watched the tip tremble in the air. It was an infallible test; as he brought the pencil lead near the formica table top, the jittering of his hand made a tick-tick-tick rhythm. No matter how strongly he willed the hand to be still, the ticking continued. As he listened it seemed to swell and become louder than the muted chugging of the roughing pumps around him.

Abruptly Gordon smashed the pencil down, gouging a black hole in the table, snapping off the lead, splintering the wood and yellow paint.

“Hey, ah—”

Gordon’s head jerked up. Albert Cooper was standing beside him. How long had he been there?

“I, ah, checked with Doctor Grundkind,” Cooper said, looking away from the pencil. “Their whole rig is off the air.”

“You looked it over yourself?” Gordon’s voice came out thin and wheezing, overcontrolled.

“Yeah, well, they’re kinda gettin’ tired of me coming around,” Cooper said sheepishly. “This time they unplugged all their stuff from the wall outlets, even.”

Gordon nodded silently.

“Well, I guess that’s it.”

“What do you mean?” Gordon said evenly.

“Look, we’ve been working on this for—what?—four days.”

“So?”

“We’re at a dead end.”

“Why?”

“Grundkind’s low-temperature group was the last candidate on our list. We’ve got everybody in the building shut down.”

“Right.”

“So this noise—it can’t be spillover from them.” “Uh huh.”

“And we know it isn’t leaking in from outside.”

“The chicken wire we wrapped around the apparatus proves that,” Gordon agreed, nodding at the metal cage now embracing the entire magnet assembly. “It should shield out stray signals.”

“Yeah. So it has to be some screwup in our electronics.”

“Nope.”

“Why not?” Cooper demanded impatiently. “Hell, maybe Hewlett-Packard is shittin’ us on the specs, how do we know?”

“We’ve checked the rig ourselves.”

“But that’s got to be it.”

“No,” Gordon said with compressed energy. “No, there’s something else.” His hand shot out and seized a stack of x-y recorder plots. “I’ve been taking these for two hours. Look.”

Cooper paged through the red-gridded sheets. “Well, it looks a little less noisy. I mean, the noise has got some regular spikes in it.”

“I tuned it in. Improved the resolution.”

“So? It’s still noise,” Cooper said irritably.

“No, it isn’t.”

“Huh? Of course it is.”

“Look at those spikes I brought up out of the hash. Look at their spacing.”

Cooper fanned the sheets out on the formica table top. After a moment he said, “I’m just eyeballing it, but… well, looks like they come at only two different intervals.”

Gordon nodded energetically. “Correct. That’s what I noticed. What we’re seeing here is a lot of background noise—damned if I know where that’s coming from—with some regular stuff on top.”

“How’d you get these plots?”

“Used the lock-in correlator, to cull out the genuine noise. This structure, this spacing—it’s there, probably been there all the time.”

“We just never looked closely enough.”

“We ‘knew’ it was garbage, and why study garbage? Stupid.” Gordon shook his head, smiling wryly at himself.

Cooper’s forehead wrinkled as he stared off into space. “I don’t get it. What’ve these pulses got to do with the nuclear resonance?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

“But, hell, that’s what this experiment is. I’m measuring the big nuclear resonance spike, when we flip the spins of the atomic nuclei. These pulses—”

“They’re not resonances. Not as I understand a simple resonance, anyway. Something’s tipping over those nuclear spins, all right, but… wait a sec.”

Gordon stared down at the x-y graphs. His left hand twitched absently at a button on his rumpled blue shirt. “I don’t think this is any sort of frequency-dependent effect.”

“But that’s what we’re plotting . The intensity of the signal received, versus the frequency we see it at.”