Gregory Benford - Timescape

“Uh, yes. I got something out of the vending machines.”

“Geez, that’s terrible food.”

“Right,” Gordon said, turning back to the equipment.

Cooper ambled over and noticed the resonance traces scattered on the lab bench. “Looks like my stuff.”

“Close, yeah.”

“You’re doing indium antimonide? Y’know, Lakin asked me about your taking so much time on the rig here. Wants to know what you’re doin’.”

“Why doesn’t he come ask me?”

A shrug. “Look, I don’t want to get—”

“I know.”

After a few neutral comments, Cooper left. Gordon had been carrying out his normal duties for the last week and then spending the evenings taking data, listening, waiting. There were random yellow jitterings among the traces, but no signal. All eroded into noise. The pumps coughed, the electronics gear gave an occasional hot ping. Tachyons , he thought. Things faster than light. It made no sense. He had taken up the idea with Wong, the particle physicist, and got the conventional reply: they violated special relativity, and anyway, there was no evidence for them. Tachyons, gliding across the universe in less time than Gordon’s eye took to absorb a photon of the pale, watery laboratory light—these things went against reason.

Then there came a flutter of interrupted resonances. Gordon had worked out a faster way of compiling the curves and he could extract the Morse coded portions almost immediately.

A few moments later, another sputter of interruptions:

and then a blur of noise. Gordon nodded to himself. He felt comfortable, working here alone, monklike. Penny didn’t like his long hours here, but that was a secondary issue. She didn’t understand that sometimes you had to press on, that the world would yield if you just kept at it.

When the scope face cleared he took a break. He walked the silent corridors of the physics building to shake off a sleepy daze. Outside Grundkind’s lab was a big sheet of computer paper with a disheartened graduate student’s scrawl at the top:

An experiment may be considered a success if no more than 50% of the observed measurements must be discarded to obtain a correspondence with theory.

Gordon smiled. The public thought of science as an absolute, sure thing, money in the bank. They never knew how some slight error could give you wildly wrong results. Below the top scrawl were penciled-in contributions from other students:

Mother nature is a bitch.

The probability of a given event occurring is inversely proportional to its desirability.

If you fool around with something long enough it will eventually break.

One fudged curve is worth a thousand weasel words.

No analysis is a complete failure—it can always serve as a bad example.

Experience varies directly with the equipment ruined.

He got himself a Hershey bar and went back to the lab.

“Jesus,” Penny said in the morning, “you look like something somebody took out of an old trunk.”

“Yeah, yeah. Got a class next hour. What’s in the larder?”

“Lard, that’s what the fuck’s in the larder—fucking lard.”

“As you’re always putting it, come on”

“Cereal, then.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Two bowls, then.”

“Look, I had to work.”

“Not getting promoted really shook you up, didn’t it?”

“Bull, just bull.”

“Bull, right.”

“I’ve got to find out.”

“That woman, Zinnes. That’s all you needed.”

“For confirmation, yes. But we don’t understand it .”

Gordon rummaged for shredded wheat. He put the toasted rolls into a bowl and threw the packet into the trash. At the bottom of the trash container was an empty half-gallon of Brookside burgundy.

“You staying there tonight?” Penny said.

“Uh, yeah.”

“I got a letter from my mother.”

“Uh huh.”

“They thought you were really pretty weird.”

“They’re right.”

“You might’ve tried.”

“I was trying to do it cool and WASP.”

“Cool and dopey.”

“I didn’t know it was that important.”

“It wasn’t. I just thought.”

“Look, there’ll be other times.”

“You got a call.”

“I mean, maybe around Thanksgiving.”

“Uh huh.”

“San Francisco, we didn’t see much of it.”

“It was from New York.”

He stopped slurping shredded wheat. “What?”

“The call. I gave him your office number.”

“I wasn’t in my office much. Who was it?”

“Didn’t say.”

“You ask?”

“No.”

“Next time, ask.”

“Yessir.”

“Oh crap.”

The San Diego Union headlined VIET REGIME TOPPLED. Gordon looked at the pictures of corpses in the streets and thought about Cliff. The Union said it was a straightforward military coup d’etat. Somebody had caught Ngo Dinh Diem and shot him in the head and that was the end of it. The Kennedy administration said they had nothing to do with it. They deplored the whole thing. On the other hand, they said, maybe this cleared the way for some true progress in the war there. Maybe so , Gordon thought dimly, and threw the paper in the lab trash can.

Claudia Zinnes had picked up some of the same fragments, but not all. The noise level came and went. Gordon wondered if there were some other effect at work, beyond the matter of Hercules being visible. Maybe the beaming of the tachyons was inaccurate. That would explain why the signal came and went. He held these ideas in his head, together with suspicions and hunches. During the long evenings of watching the scope he turned them like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, fitting edges together. His hunch was based on the solar apex number, and it led to a conclusion about the messages that he found difficult to believe. He tried to steer clear of the conclusion. There might easily be another explanation, after all. On the other hand, Wong had mentioned the causality argument against tachyons, so there was at least some crude connection. Occam’s Razor did not seem to be of much use here. The whole thing had an Alice-in-Wonderland quality about it. Which meant, he reminded himself, that it was even more important to stick to the facts, the digits, the hard data. Give me a solid set of numbers and I shall rule the world , he thought to himself, and laughed out loud.

He had dozed. He shook himself and rubbed his eyes. Halfway through the gesture he jerked his hands away and stared at the chart recorder.

Jagged lines. The lyric curves of the resonances were shot through with sudden interruptions.

He fished backward through the spool of tape. If he had missed the key-in point—

But no; there it was. He began to decode.

NEUROM I OL AJ WRITE QUOTE MESSAGE RECEIVED LA JOLLA UNQUOTE ON PAPER PLACE IN SAFETY DEPOSIT VAULT SAN DIEGO FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS IN NAME OF IAN PETERSON MUST GUARANTEE BOX HELD THIRTY SIX YEARS SENDING THIS TO CHECK RECEIPT OF TRANSWRSODRMCJ RESULTING DINO-FLAGELLATES AND PLANKTONIC AVSDLDU AHXNDUROPFLM

The clerk peered at him. “Yes, it’s true, we do have free safety deposit boxes. But until the end of the century—!” He raised his eyebrows.

“You offer that, don’t you?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“In a public advertisement.”

“Certainly. However, the intent—”

“Your ad says I get a safety deposit box if I maintain a minimum balance of twenty-five dollars, right?”

“Indeed. But as I was beginning to say, we intend this as an initial offering to encourage clients to set up accounts. The firm certainly does not mean for customers to hold these indefinitely, solely on the strength—”