Gregory Benford - Timescape

“What’s your hunch?”

Gordon shook his head silently.

“Come on . Look, you can tell me.”

“No. Nobody. I’m telling nobody until I’m sure. This whole thing is going to be mine. I don’t want word leaking out before I can nail it for sure.”

“Christ, Gordon, I’m Penny . Remember me?”

“Look, I’m not saying.”

“Goddamn, you’re getting completely screwed up in the head, you know that?”

“If you don’t like it, you can leave me alone.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I will, Gordon. Maybe I will.”

He found himself falling asleep in the day. He would jerk awake before the oscilloscope as though startled by some noise, instantly afraid that he had missed some data.

He taught his Classical Electricity and Magnetism class as though in a dream. He would drift from one blackboard to another, jotting down formulas in what he thought was a neat, readable print. He spoke facing the class, but he gave the impression of carrying on an internal debate with himself. Occasionally, after lecture, he would glance back at the boards before leaving, and be shocked at the cluttered lines of nearly unreadable scribbles.

Lakin avoided talking to Gordon about anything other than routine laboratory operations. Cooper, too, stayed in his small student’s office and seldom sought out Gordon, even when he was blocked on a particular point. Gordon rarely went up to the Physics Department office on the third floor any more. Secretaries had to seek him out in the laboratory. He brought his own lunch in a bag and ate it there, tending the NMR apparatus, fighting the recurring signal/noise problems, watching the jiggling yellow lines of the resonance curves.

“Dr. Bernstein?”

“Huh?” Gordon had been dozing in front of the scope. His eyes darted to the resonance lines, but they were undisturbed. Good; he had missed nothing. Only then did he look up at the slender man who stood inside the laboratory door.

“I’m from UPI. I’m doing a background story on the Ramsey-Hussinger results. They’ve excited an enormous amount of concern, you know. I thought I would look into the contributions made by other faculty to—”

“Why come to me?”

“I could not help but notice that you were the man Professor Ramsey kept looking at during their press conference. I wondered if you might he the ‘other sources’ Professor Ramsey recently admitted—”

“When did he say that?”

“Just yesterday, while I was interviewing him.”

“Shit.”

“What was that. Doctor? You seem rather concerned.”

“No, nothing. Look, I have nothing to say.”

“Are you sure, Doctor?”

“I said I have nothing to say. Now leave, please.”

The man opened his mouth. Gordon jerked his thumb toward the door. “Out, I said. Out”

Gordon worked each day, gradually collecting fragments of sentences. They came out of sequence. The technical information was repetitious, probably to be sure it came through correctly, despite transmission and receiving errors. But why? he thought. This stuff fits my guesses, sure. But there must be an explanation in this text itself. A rational explanation, clearly set out. One evening he had a dream in which Uncle Herb was watching him play chess in Washington Square. His uncle frowned as Gordon moved the pieces across the squares and said over and over, in a disapproving voice, “God forbid there should not be a rational explanation.”

On the morning of Monday, November 5, he drove into work late. He had got into a pointless argument with Penny over minor domestic matters. He turned on the car radio to take his mind off it. The lead news item was that Maria Goeppert Mayer of UCLJ had won the Nobel Prize in physics. Gordon was so stunned by the news he barely recovered in time to make the turn at the top of Torrey Pines Road. A Lincoln blared its horn at him and the driver—a man in a hat driving with his lights on—glared. Mayer had won the prize for the shell model of the nucleus. She shared it with Eugene Wigner of Princeton and Hans Jensen, a German who had devised the shell model at about the same time as Maria.

The University held a press conference that afternoon. Maria Mayer was shy and soft-spoken beneath the barrage of questions. Gordon went to see. The questions asked were mostly dumb, but you expected that. The kindly woman who had stopped to inquire about his results, when the rest of the department was ignoring him, was now a Nobel Prize winner. The fact took a while to sink in. He had a sudden sense that things were converging at this place, this time. The research done here was important. There were the Carroways and their quasar riddle, Gell-Mann’s arrays of particles, Dyson’s visions, Marcuse and Maria Mayer and the news that Jonas Salk was coming to build an institute. La Jolla was a nexus. He was grateful to be here.

THE SIGNAL STRENGTH GOT ABRUPTLY BETTER. THERE were whole paragraphs about the Wheeler-Feynman theory. Gordon called Claudia Zinnes to see if the Columbia group was getting the same results.

“No, not for five days now,” she said. “First we had some equipment failure. Then the graduate student got the flu—the one that’s been going around. I think he was overtired. Those times you gave us—that’s ten, twelve hours in the lab, Gordon.”

“You mean you have nothing?”

“Not for those days, no.”

“Can’t you do some of the times yourself?”

“I will, starting tomorrow. I do have other things to do, you know.”

“Sure, yes. I want to have some confirmation, that’s all.”

“We have that now , Gordon. Of the effect, I mean.”

“It’s not only the effect that’s important. Claudia, look back over those signals. Think about what it means.”

“Gordon, I don’t think we know enough yet to—”

“Okay, I agree, basically. Most of my data is a jumble. Fragments. Pieces of sentences. Formulas. But there is a consistent feel to it.”

Her voice took on the precise, professional clarity he remembered from graduate school. “First the data, Gordon. Then we indulge in some theory, maybe.”

“Yeah, right.” He knew better than to argue with her on the philosophy of experimental physics. She had rather rigid views.

“I promise you, I start up tomorrow.”

“Okay, but it could fade by then. I mean—”

“Don’t kvetch, Gordon. Tomorrow we start again.”

It came less than three hours later, shortly after noon on Tuesday, November 6. Names, dates. The spreading bloom. The phrases describing this were clipped and tense. Parts were garbled. Letters were missing. One long passage, though, related how the experiments had begun and who was involved. These sentences were longer and more relaxed and almost conversational, as though someone were simply sending what came into his head.

—WITH MARKHAM GONE AND BLOODY DUMB RENFREW CARRYING ON THERE’S NO FUTURE IN OUR LITTLE PLAN NO PAST EITHER I SUPPOSE THE LANGUAGE CAN’T DEAL WITH IT BUT THE THING SHOULD HAVE WORKED IF—

There came a scramble of noise. The long passage disappeared and did not return. The terse biological information reappeared. There were missing words. The noise was rising like a tossing sea. Through the last staccato sentences there ran an unstated sense of desperation.