Gregory Benford - Timescape

Gordon had no chance to think about the message until the afternoon. His morning was filled out by a lecture and then a committee meeting on graduate student admissions. There were top-flight students applying from all over—Chicago, Caltech, Berkeley, Columbia, MIT, Cornell, Princeton, Stanford. The canonical seats of wisdom. A few unusual cases—two odd ones from Oklahoma who might be promising, a gifted and quiet fellow from Long Beach State—were put aside for study. It was plain that La Jolla’s fame was spreading rapidly. In part it was the continuing heady rush of the Sputnik phenomenon. Gordon was riding that wave himself, and he knew it; these were ripe times for science. He wondered, though, about the students just now coming into physics. Some of them seemed like the same sort that went into law or medicine—not because it was a fascinating subject, but because it promised big bucks. Gordon wondered privately whether Cooper had elements of that; the man showed sparks of the old flame, but it lay hidden beneath a blanket of mellow relaxation, an aura of physical assurance. Even the message, the very existence of a message, struck Cooper as a little funny but basically acceptable, an odd effect, soon to be explained. Gordon could not tell whether this was a pose or genuine serenity; either way, it was unsettling. Gordon was used to a more intense style. He envied the physicists who had made the great discoveries when quantum mechanics was unfolding, when the nucleus first shattered. The older members of the department, Eckart and Lieberman, talked of those days sometimes. Before the 1940s, a degree in physics was a solid basis for a career in electrical engineering, period. The bomb had changed all that. In the avalanche of gaudy weapons, new fields of study, increased budgets, and expanding horizons, everyone discovered suddenly a national thirst for physicists. In the years following Hiroshima a newspaper story referring to a physicist invariably called him “the brilliant nuclear physicist,” as though there could be no other kind. Physics got fatter. Even so, physicists were still relatively poorly paid; Gordon could remember a visiting professor at Columbia borrowing money to attend the Friday “Chinese lunch” Lee and Yang had started up. The lunches met in one of the excellent Chinese restaurants ringing the campus, and it was there that new results often surfaced first. Attendance was a good idea if you wanted to keep up. So the visiting scholar had scrounged enough to go, and paid it back within a week. Such days seemed distant to Gordon now, though they must loom large in the minds of the older physicists, he realized. Some, like Lakin, carried an air of uneasy waiting, as though the bubble would soon burst. The dazed public, with its short attention span, would be distracted by the cornucopia of tail fins and ranch-style tract homes, and forget about science. The easy equation—science equals engineering equals consumer yummies—would fade. Physics had spent more time at the bottom of the S curve than chemistry—World War I was the flush time for them—and now was enjoying the steep climb. But a plateau had to follow. The S curve had to curl over.

Gordon mulled this over as he made his way from the laboratory up the outside stairs to Lakin’s office. The lab notebooks were carefully organized and he had checked over the decoding of the message repeatedly. Still, he was of half a mind to turn around and avoid seeing Lakin at all.

He was only a few sentences into his presentation when Lakin said, “Really, Gordon, I had trusted you would fix this trouble by now.”

“Isaac, these are the facts.”

“No.” The trimly built man got up from behind his desk and began to pace. “I have looked into your experiment in detail. I read your notes—Cooper showed me where they were.”

Gordon frowned. “Why not ask me for them?”

“You were in class. And—I speak frankly—I wanted to see Cooper’s own entries, in his own hand.”

“Why?”

“You admit you did not take all the data by yourself.”

“No, of course not. He’s got to do something for a thesis.”

“And he is behind schedule, yes. Significantly behind.” Lakin stopped and made one of his characteristic movements, dipping his head slightly and raising his eyebrows as he looked at Gordon, as though gazing over the rims of nonexistent eyeglasses. Gordon supposed this was a glance meant to convey something unprovable but obvious, an unspoken understanding between colleagues.

“I don’t think he’s faking it, if that’s what you mean,” he said very steadily, keeping inflection out of his voice with some effort.

“How could you tell?”

“The data I took fits in with the syntax of the rest of the message.”

“That could be a deliberate effect, somehow cooked up by Cooper.” Lakin turned toward the window, hands clasped behind his back, his voice now carrying a shade of hesitation.

“Come on , Isaac.”

Lakin suddenly rounded on him. “Very well You tell me , then, what is going on,” he said crisply.

“We have an effect, but no explanation. That’s what’s going on. Nothing more.” He waved the page of decoded message in the air, slicing blades of sunlight descending from the windows.

“Then we are agreed.” Lakin smiled. “A very strange effect. Something makes the nuclear spins relax, bing , like that. Spontaneous resonance.”

“Thai’s crap.” Gordon had thought they were really homing in on the point, and now this old song and dance came up.

“It is a simple statement of what we know.”

“How do you explain this?” He waved the message again.

“I do not.” Lakin shrugged elaborately. “I would not even mention it, if I were you.”

“Until we understand it—”

“No. We do understand enough. Enough to talk in public about spontaneous resonance.” Lakin began a technical summary, ticking off the points on his fingers with a precise gesture. Gordon could see he had grilled Cooper thoroughly. Lakin knew how to present the data, which quantities to plot, how the figures in a paper could build a very convincing case. “Spontaneous resonance” would make an interesting paper. No, an exciting one.

When Lakin was finished, and had sketched out the scientific arguments, Gordon said casually, “Half a true story can still be a lie, you know.”

Lakin grimaced. “I’ve humored you quite a bit, Gordon. For months. It is time to admit the truth.”

“Uh huh. What is it?”

“That your techniques are still faulty.”

“How?”

“I do not know.” He shrugged, dipping his head and raising his eyebrows again. “I cannot be in the laboratory constantly.”

“We have been able to array the resonance signals—”

“So they seem to say something.” Lakin smiled tolerantly. “They could say anything , Gordon, if you fool with them enough. Look—” He spread his hands. “You remember, from astronomy, the fellow Lowell?”

“Yes,” Gordon said suspiciously.

“He ‘discovered’ the canals on Mars. Saw them for years, decades. Other people reported, seeing them. Lowell had his own observatory built in the desert, he was a rich man. He had excellent seeing conditions there. The man had time and fine eyesight. So he discovered evidence of intelligence.”

“Yeah, but—” Gordon began.

“The only mistake was that he had the wrong conclusion. The intelligent life was on his side of the telescope, not the Mars end. His mind—” Lakin jabbed a forefinger at his own temple “—saw a flickering image and then imposed order on it. His own intelligence was tricking him.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Gordon said sourly He couldn’t think of a counterargument. Lakin was better at these things, knew more stories, had a subtle instinct for maneuver.