Gregory Benford - Timescape

“Uh, you busy?”

It was Cooper. “No, come on in.” Gordon pushed the pile of papers he was grading to the corner of his desk. Then he leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on top of them. He clasped his hands behind his neck, elbows out, and grinned. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, I’m gonna take my exam again in three weeks, y’know. What do I say about those interruptions? I mean, Lakin and the others came down on me like a shitload of bricks last time.”

“Right. If I were you, I would ignore the point.”

“But I can’t They’ll cream me again.”

“I’ll take care of them.”

“Huh? How?”

“I’ll have a little work of my own to present, by that time.”

“Well, I dunno… Getting Lakin off my back is nontrivial. You saw the way he—”

“Why do you say ‘nontrivial’? Why not ‘hard’ or ‘difficult’?”

“Well, you know, it’s physics talk…”

“Yes, ‘physics talk,’ We have a lot of jargon like that. I wonder if sometimes it doesn’t disguise things, rather than making them clearer.”

Cooper gave Gordon an odd look. “I guess.”

“Don’t look so uncertain,” Gordon said jovially. “You’re home free. I’m going to save your ass.”

“Uh, okay.” Cooper moved uncertainly to the door. “If you say so…”

“See you on the ramparts,” Gordon said by way of dismissal.

He was about a quarter of the way through the first draft of his paper for Science when there was a knock on his door. He had decided on Science because it was big and prestigious and got things into print fairly quickly. They carried long articles, so he could tell the whole thing in one piece, stacking up the evidence in a pile so high no one could knock it down. He had already checked with Claudia Zinnes. She would publish a letter in the same issue, confirming some or his observations.

“Hello. Can we come in?” It was the twins, first-year graduate students.

“Well, look, I’m pretty busy—”

“It’s your office hours.”

“It is? Oh yes. Well, what did you want?”

“You graded some of our problems wrong,” one of them said. The flat statement took Gordon aback. He was used to a little more humility from students. “Oh?” he countered.

“Yeah. Look—” One of them began to write rapidly on Gordon’s blackboard, covering up some notes Gordon had put there while he was outlining his paper. Gordon tried to follow the argument the twin was making. “Careful of that stuff I have written there.” The twin frowned at Gordon’s intruding lines. “Okay,” he said democratically, and began to write around them. Gordon focused his attention on the rapid-fire sentences about Bessel’s functions and boundary conditions on the electric field. It took him five minutes to straighten out the twin’s misconception. All through it he was never sure which one of the twins he was talking to. They were virtually carbon copies. As soon as one finished the other would leap to the attack with a new objection, usually phrased in a cryptic few words. Gordon found them exceptionally tiring. After ten more minutes, during which they began to interrogate him about his research and how much money a research assistant made, he finally got rid of them by pleading a headache. That, plus three significant glances at his watch, got them out the door. As he was closing it, another voice called, “Wait a sec! Dr. Bernstein!”

Gordon reluctantly opened it. The man from UPI stepped partway in. “I know you don’t want to be bothered, Professor—”

“Right. So why are you bothering me?”

“Because Professor Ramsey blew the story to me, just now. That’s why.”

“What story?”

“About you and those chain molecules. Where you got the picture in the first place. How you wanted it kept secret. I’ve got it all, the works.” The man beamed at him.

“Why did Ramsey tell you?”

“I worked out some of it. He didn’t paper over the seams in his story very well. Not a very good liar, Ramsey.”

“I suppose not.”

“He wasn’t going to tell me anything. But I remembered that thing you were involved in a while back.”

Gordon said with sudden fatigue, “Saul Shriffer.”

“Yeah, he’s the guy. Me, I put two and two together. I went to see Ramsey for some more backgrounding and in the middle of it I popped him with that one.”

“And he babbled like a brook.”

“You got it.”

Gordon sagged into his chair. He sat there, slumped down, staring at the man from United Press International.

“Well?” the man said. He took out a notebook. “You going to tell me, Professor?”

“I don’t appreciate being grilled.”

“Sorry if I offended you, Professor. I’m not grilling you. I just did a little sniffing around and—”

“Okay, okay, I’m sensitive about that.”

“It’s going to come out sometime, you know. The Ramsey-Hussinger thing hasn’t got any real attention in the papers so far, I know. But it’s going to be important. People are going to hear about it. Your part could be valuable.”

In a dreamy way Gordon began to laugh softly. “Could be valuable…” he said, and laughed again.

The man frowned. “Hey, look, you are going to tell me, aren’t you?”

Gordon felt an odd, seeping tiredness in himself. He sighed. “I… I suppose I am.”

GORDON HAD NOT REALIZED THE LIGHTS WOULD BE so bright. There were banks of lamps to both sides of the small platform, to make his face shadow-free. A TV camera snout peered at him, an unwinking Cyclops. There were some chemists in the audience, and nearly all the Physics Department. The department draftsman had labored until midnight to get all the charts drawn. Gordon had found the staff a great help in hustling things together for this. He was beginning to realize that the hostility he had felt from them all was an illusion, a product of his own doubts. The last few days had been a revelation. Department members hailed him in the hall, listened intently to his descriptions of his data, and visited the lab.

He looked around for Penny. There—near the back, in a pink dress. She smiled wanly at his hand wave. The press men were murmuring to each other and finding seats. The TV crewmen were in place and a woman with a microphone gave lastminute instructions. Gordon counted the crowd. Incredibly, it was larger than the number who turned out for Maria Mayer’s Nobel conference. But then, this one had a day or two of lead time. The UPI man got his exclusive story—picked up by the other wire services—and then the University had stepped in and set up this dog and pony show.

Gordon riffled through his notes with damp fingers. He had not really wanted any of this. The feel of it seemed somehow wrong to him—science carried on in public, science elbowing for time on the 6 o’clock news, science as a commodity. The momentum of it was immense. In the end there would remain the article in Science , where his results had to meet their tests, where no amount of bias for or against him could tip the scales—

“Dr. Bernstein? We’re ready.”

He wiped his brow one last time. “Okay, shoot.” A green light winked on.

He looked into the camera and tried to smile.