Gregory Benford: Timescape

The palm tree still stopped him every time. Each morning, after Gordon Bernstein had slammed the yellow front door of the bungalow a little too loudly, he turned and looked at the palm tree and stopped. The pause was a moment of recognition. He was really here, in California. Not a movie set; the real thing. The palm tree silhouette thrust spearing fronds into a cloudless sky, silently exotic. This matter-of-fact plant was far more impressive than the strangely blank freeways or the unrelentingly balmy weather.

Most evenings, Gordon sat up late with Penny, reading and listening to folk records. Things were exactly like his years at Columbia. He kept the same habits, and very nearly forgot that half a block away was Windansea Beach with its rolling surf. When he left his windows open, the rumble of the waves seemed like the traffic noise on 2nd Avenue, a distant blur of other people’s lives that he had always successfully avoided, there in his apartment. So it came as a small shock each morning when he ventured out, jiggling his car keys nervously, mind mumbling away to itself, and the palm tree yanked him back into this new reality.

Weekends, it was easier to remember that this was California. Then he would wake to see Penny’s long blond hair fanned out over the pillow beside him. During the week she had early classes and left while he was still asleep. She moved so lightly and quietly that she never disturbed him. Each morning, it was as though she had never been there. She left nothing lying around. There wasn’t even a dent in the bed where she had slept.

Gordon slipped the tinkling keys into his pocket and walked along a bottlebrush hedge and out into the broad boulevards of La Jolla. This, too, was still a little strange to him. The streets had ample room to park his ’58 Chevy and leave immense stretches of concrete for the two center lanes. The streets were as big as the building lots; they seemed to define the landscape, like vast recreation grounds for the dominant species, automobiles. Compared to 2nd Avenue, which was more like a ventilating shaft between slabs of brown brick, this was extravagant excess. In New York, Gordon had always braced himself when he went down the steps, knowing that when he pushed open the front door of wired glass there would be dozens of people within sight. They would be briskly moving along, a churn of lives. He could always count on that press of flesh around him. Here, nothing. Nautilus Street was a flat white plain baking in the morning sun, unpeopled. He climbed into his Chevy and the roar of starting the engine cracked the silence, seeming to conjure up in his rear view mirror a long low Chrysler which came over the rise a block away and went by, making a swishing noise.

On the way to the campus he drove with one hand and spun the radio dial with the other, rummaging through the discordant blocks of sound that passed for pop music out here. He preferred folk music, really, but had an odd affection for some old Buddy Holly songs and lately had found himself humming them in the shower— Every day it’s a-gittin closer… Well that’ll be the day … He found a high-pitched Beach Boys number and let the dial rest. The tenor warblings about sand and sun described perfectly the travelogue views that swept by outside. He coasted down La Jolla Boulevard and watched the distant small dots that were riding in on a slowly broadening fan of white surf. Kids, unaccountably not in school, even though classes had started two weeks ago.

He swooped down the hillside and into a pack of slowed cars, mostly big black Lincolns and Cadillacs. He eased down on the brake and noticed new buildings on Mount Soledad. The earth was scraped raw and terraced, trucks climbing over the ruined soil like insects. Gordon smiled tartly, knowing that even if he unsnarled the experiment, and produced a brilliant result, and got tenure, and therefore made a higher salary, he still could not afford the cedar and glass homes that would slant out from that hillside. Not unless he took on a lot of consulting on the side and rose quickly at the University to boot, perhaps wangling his way into a part-time deanship to boost the monthly check. But that was unlikely as hell.

He grimaced behind his thick black beard, shifted the Chevy’s gears as the Beach Boys faded into a Dirt’s out, Tide’s in jingle, and the car surged through traffic with a rich, throaty growl, toward the University of California at La Jolla.

Gordon tapped absentmindedly on the dewar of liquid nitrogen, trying to think how to say what he wanted, and dimly realized that he just couldn’t like Albert Cooper. The guy seemed pleasant enough: sandy-haired, a slow talker who sometimes slurred his words, obviously well muscled from his hobbies of scuba diving and tennis. But Cooper’s taciturn calm blunted Gordon’s momentum, time and again. His smiling, easygoing manner seemed to reflect some distant, bemused tolerance of Gordon, and Gordon found himself bristling.

“Look, Al,” he said, turning rapidly away from the steaming nozzle of the dewar. “You’ve been with me well over a year, right?”

“Check.”

“You were doing pretty well with Professor Lakin, I joined the department, Lakin was too busy, so you shifted over to me. And I took you on.” Gordon rocked back on his heels, wedged his hands into his back pockets. “Because Lakin said you were good.”

“Sure.”

“And now you’ve been plugging away on this indium antimonide experiment for—what?—a year and a half, easy.”

“Right,” Cooper said somewhat quizzically.

“I think it’s time you canned the bullshit.”

Cooper gave no visible reaction. “Ummmm. I don’t… uh… know what you mean.”

“I come in here this morning. I ask you about the job I gave you. You tell me you went over every amplifier, every Varian component, the works.”

“Uh huh. I did.”

“And the noise is still there.”

“I checked. Ran the whole sequence.”

“That’s bullshit.”

Cooper sighed elaborately. “So you found out about it, huh?”

Gordon frowned. “Found out what?”

“I know you’re a stickler for carrying an experiment through, A to Z, with no delays, Dr. Bernstein. I know that.” Cooper shrugged apologetically. “But I couldn’t finish the whole thing last night. So I went out and had a few beers with the guys. Then I came back and did it all over.

Gordon wrinkled his brow. “There’s nothing wrong with that. You can always take a break. Just so you keep everything steady, don’t let the preamps or the scopes go off their zero adjustments.”

“No, they were still okay.”

“Then—” Gordon spread his hands, exasperated. “—you’ve screwed up somewhere. It’s not the beer-drinking I care about, it’s the experiment . Look, the conventional wisdom is that it takes four years minimum to get out. Do you want to make it that fast?”

“Sure.”

“Then do what I say and don’t slack off.” “But I haven’t.”

“You must’ve. You just haven’t looked. I can—”

“The noise is still there,” Cooper said with a certainty that stopped Gordon in mid-sentence. Gordon abruptly realized that he had been browbeating this man, only three years younger, for no reason whatever, aside from frustration.

“Look, I—” Gordon began, but found the next word catching in his throat. He felt suddenly embarrassed. “Okay, I believe you,” he said, making his voice brisk and businesslike. “Let’s see the chart recordings you took.”

Cooper had been leaning against the blocky magnet that enclosed the kernel of their experiment. He turned and threaded his way through the lanes of cables and microwave guides. The experiment was still running. The silvery flask, suspended between the poles of the magnet and all but obscured by cable lead-ins, had grown a coat of ice. Inside it liquid helium frothed and bubbled, boiling away at temperatures only a few degrees above absolute zero. The ice was water frozen out from the air around the jacket, and it made an occasional snap as the equipment expanded and contracted to relieve stress. The brilliantly lit laboratory hummed with electronic life. A few meters away the sheer heat of the banks upon banks of transistorized diagnostics made a warming wall of air. From the helium, though, Gordon could feel a gentle, chilling draft. Despite the coolness Cooper wore a torn T-shirt and blue jeans. Gordon preferred a blue long-sleeve button-down shirt, Oxford broadcloth, with corduroy slacks that belted in the back, and a tweed jacket. He had not yet adjusted to the informality of laboratories here. If it meant going as far downhill as Cooper, he was certain he never would.