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  “They’re giving it so much time” Penny said wonderingly.

  “Shhh!”

  “—light travels in a year, at a speed of 186,000 miles per second.” A shot of Saul standing beside a small telescope. “The possible message was detected in a way astronomers had not anticipated—in an experiment by Professor Gordon Bernstein—”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Gordon groaned.

  “—at the University of California at La Jolla. The experiment involved a low-temperature measurement of how atoms line up in a magnetic field. The Bernstein experiments are still being studied—it is not certain that they are, in fact, picking up some signal from a distant civilization. But Professor Shriffer, a collaborator with Bernstein who broke the code in the signal, says he wants to alert the scientific community.” A picture of Saul writing equations at the blackboard. “There is a puzzling part of the message. A picture—”

  A well-drawn version of the interweaving curves. Saul stood in front of it, speaking into a hand-held microphone. “Understand,” he said, “we make no specific claims at this time. But we would like the help of the scientific community in unraveling what this might mean.” Some brief talk about the decoding followed.

  Back to Cronkite. “Several astronomers CBS News asked today for opinions expressed skepticism. If Professor Shriffer proves correct, though, it could mean very big news, indeed,” Cronkite made his reassuring smile. “And that’s the way it is, April the twelfth—”

  Gordon clicked Cronkite off. “Goddamn,” he said, still stunned.

  “I thought it was very well done,” Penny said judiciously.

  “Well done? He wasn’t supposed to use my name at all!”

  “Why, don’t you want any credit?”

  “Credit? Christ—!” Gordon slammed a fist against the gray plaster wall with a resounding thump. “He did it all wrong, don’t you see that? I had this sinking feeling when he told me, and sure enough—there’s my name, tied to his crackpot theory!”

  “But it’s your measurement—”

  “I told him, keep my name out”

  “Well, it was Walter Cronkite who gave your name. Not Saul.”

  “Who cares who said it? I’m in it with Saul, now.”

  “Why didn’t they have you on TV?” Penny asked innocently, clearly unable to see what all the fuss was about. “It was just a lot of pictures of Saul.”

  Gordon grimaced. “That’s his strong suit. Simplify science down to a few sentences, screw it up any way you want, pander to the lowest common denominator—but be sure Saul Shriffer’s name is in lights. Big, gaudy, neon lights. Crap. Just—”

  “He sort of hogged the credit, didn’t he?”

  Gordon looked at her, puzzled. “Credit… ?” He stopped pacing the room. He saw that she honestly thought his anger was over not getting his face on TV. “Good grief.” He felt suddenly hot and flushed. He began unbuttoning his blue broadcloth shirt and thought about what to do. No point in talking to Penny—she was light years away from understanding how scientists felt about something like this.

  He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, puffing, and walking into the kitchen, where the telephone was.

  • • •

  Gordon began with, “Saul, I’m mad as hell.”

  “Ah…” Gordon could picture Saul selecting just the right words. He was good at that, but it wasn’t going to do him any good this time. “Well, I know now you feel, Gordon, I really do, I saw the network show two hours ago and it was just as much a surprise to me as it was to you. The local Boston footage was clean, no mention of your name explicitly, the way you wanted it. I called them right away after I saw the Cronkite thing and they said it got all changed around up at the network level.”

  “How did the network people know, Saul, if you didn’t—”

  “Well, look, I had to tell the local people. For background info, y’know.”

  “You said it wouldn’t get on.”

  “I did what I could, Gordon. I was going to call you.”

  “Why didn’t you? Why let me see it without—”

  “I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind so much, after seeing how much time we got.” Saul’s voice changed tone. “It’s a big play, Gordon! People are going to sit up and take notice.”

  Gordon said sourly, “Yeah, notice.”

  “We’ll get some action on that picture. We’ll crack this thing.”

  “It’ll crack us, more likely. Saul, I said I didn’t want to get dragged in. You said—”

  “Don’t you see that was unrealistic?” Saul’s voice was calm and reasonable. “I humored you, sure, but it was bound to come out.”

  “Not this way.”

  “Believe me, this is how things work, Gordon. You weren’t getting anywhere before, were you? Admit it.”

  He took a deep breath. “If anybody asks me, Saul, I’m going to say I don’t know where the signals are coming from. That’s the plain truth.”

  “But that’s not the whole truth.”

  “You are talking to me about the whole truth? You, Saul? You, who talked me into withholding the first message?”

  “That was different. I wanted to clarify the issue—”

  “The issue, shit! Listen, anybody asks me, I say I don’t agree with your interpretation.”

  “You’ll release the first message?”

  “I…” Gordon hesitated. “No, I don’t want to stir things up any more.” He wondered if Ramsey would continue to work on the experiments if he made the message public. Hell, for all he knew there really was some sort of national security element mixed up in this. Gordon knew he didn’t want any part of that. No, it was better to drop it.

  “Gordon, I can understand your feelings.” The voice warmed. “All I ask is that you don’t hinder what I’m trying to do. I won’t get in your way, you don’t get in mine.”

  “Well…” Gordon paused, his momentum blunted.

  “And I truly am sorry about Cronkite and your name getting into it and all that. Okay?”

  “I… okay,” Gordon muttered, not really knowing what he was agreeing with.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  1998

  GREGORY MARKHAM STOOD WITH HIS HANDS BEHIND his back, the gray of his temples giving him a remote, solemn air. The muted humming of the laboratory seemed to him a warming sound, a preoccupied buzzing of instruments which, if only in their unpredictable failures and idiosyncrasies, often resembled busy mortal workers. The laboratory was an island of sound in the hushed husk of the Cavendish, commanding all remaining resources. The Cav had ushered in the modern age, using the work of Faraday and Maxwell to create the tamed miracle of electricity. Now, Markham mused, at its center, a few men remained, trying to reach backward, swimmers against the stream.

  Renfrew moved among the banks and lanes of instruments, darting from one trouble spot to another. Markham smiled at the man’s energy. In part it arose from the quiet presence of Ian Peterson, who lounged back in a chair and studied the oscilloscope face where the main signal was displayed. Renfrew fretted, aware that beneath Peterson’s veiled calm the man never lost his assessing eye.

  Renfrew came stamping back to the central oscilloscope and glanced at the dancing jumble of noise. “Damn!” he said vehemently. “Bloody stuff won’t go away.”

  Peterson volunteered, “Well, it’s not absolutely necessary for you to send the new signals while I watch. I simply stopped by to check up on matters.”

  “No, no,” Renfrew shifted his shoulders awkwardly under his brown jacket. Markham noted the jacket pockets were crammed with electronics parts, apparently stuck there and forgotten. “I got a good run yesterday. No reason why I shouldn’t today. I transmitted that astronomical part steadily for three hours.”

  “I must say I don’t see the necessity for that,” Peterson said, “considering the difficulty in sending the truly important—”

  “It’s to help anyone receiving on the other end,” Markham said, stepping forward. He made his face resolutel
y neutral, though in fact he was rather distantly amused by the way the two other men seemed to immediately hit upon an area of disagreement, as though drawn to it. “John here thinks it might help them to know when our beam will be easiest to detect. The astronomical coordinates—”

  “I fully understand,” Peterson cut him off. “What I don’t understand is why you don’t devote your quiet periods to the essential material.”

  “Such as?” Markham asked quickly.

  “Tell them what we’re doing, and repeat the ocean material, and—”

  “We’ve done all that to death,” Renfrew blurted. “But if they can’t receive it, what bloody—”

  “Look, look,” Markham said mildly, “there’s time enough to do it all, right? Agreed? When the noise goes down, the first priority should be sending that bank message of yours, and then John here can—”

  “You didn’t send it right away?” Peterson cried with surprise.

  Renfrew said, “Ah, no, I hadn’t finished the other material and—”

  “Well!” Peterson seemed excited by this; he stood up quickly and paced energetically in the small space before the towering gray cabinets. “I told you about finding the note—quite surprising, I must admit.”

  “Yes,” Markham admitted. There had been considerable agitation when Peterson appeared this morning, bearing the yellow paper. Suddenly the entire thing had seemed real to them all.

  “Well,” Peterson went on, “I was thinking about your trying to, ah, extend the experiment.”

  “Extend?” Renfrew asked.

  “Yes. Don’t send my message.”

  “Good grief,” was all Markham could say.

  “But, but don’t you see that…” Renfrew’s voice trailed off.

  “I thought it would be an interesting experiment.”

  Markham said, “Sure. Very interesting. But it will set up a paradox.”

  “That was my idea,” Peterson said swiftly.

  “But a paradox is what we don’t want,” Renfrew said. “It’ll bugger the whole idea.”

  “I explained that to you,” Markham said to Peterson. “The switch being hung up between on and off, remember?”

  “Yes, I understand that perfectly well, but—”

  “Then don’t suggest rubbish!” Renfrew cried. “If you want to reach the past and know you have done it, then leave hands off.”

  Peterson said with glacial calm, “The only reason you do know is that I went to the bank in La Jolla. The way I see the matter is that I have confirmed your success.”

  There was an awkward silence. “Ah… yes,” Markham put in to fill the pause. He had to admit Peterson was right. It was precisely the kind of simple check he or Renfrew should have tried. But they were schooled in thinking of mechanical experiments, full of devices which operated without human intervention. The notion of asking for a confirming sign simply had not occurred to them. And now Peterson, the know-nothing administrator, had proved the whole scheme was right, and he had done it without any sophisticated thinking at all.

  Markham took a deep breath. It was heady, realizing that you were doing something never accomplished before, something beyond your own understanding, but undeniably real. It had often been said that science at times put you into a kind of contact with the world that nothing else could. This morning, and Peterson’s single sheet, had done that, but in a strangely different way. The triumph of an experiment was when you reached a fresh plateau of knowledge. With tachyons, though, they had no true understanding. There was only the simple note on a scrap of yellow.

  “Ian, I know how you feel It would be damned interesting to omit your message. But no one knows what that would mean. It might prevent us from doing what you want—namely convey the ocean information.”

  Renfrew underlined these sentiments with a “Damned right!” and turned back to the apparatus.

  Peterson’s eyelids lowered, as though he was deep in thought. “A good point. You know, for a moment there I thought there could be some way of finding out more that way.”

  “We could,” Markham agreed. “But unless we do only what we understand…”

  “Right,” Peterson said. “We rule out paradoxes, agreed. But later…” He had a wistful look.

  “Later, sure,” Markham murmured. It was odd, he thought, how the players had reversed roles here. Peterson was supposedly the can-do administrator, pressing for results above all else. Yet now Peterson wanted to push the parameters of the experiment and find out some new physics.

  And opposing this were Renfrew and himself, suddenly uncertain of what a paradox might produce. Ironies abounded.

  • • •

  An hour later the fine points of logic had faded, as they so often did, before the gritty details of the experiment itself. Noise smeared the flat face of the oscilloscope. Despite earnest work from the technicians the jitter in the experiment would not diminish. Unless it did, the tachyon beam would be uselessly diffuse and weak.

  “Y’know,” Markham murmured, leaning back in his wooden lab chair, “I think your Caltech stuff may bear on this, Ian.”

  Peterson looked up from reading the file with a red CONFIDENTIAL stamped across it. During the lulls he had been steadily working his way through a briefcase of paperwork. “Oh? How?”

  “Those cosmological calculations—good work. Brilliant, in fact. Clustered universes. Now, suppose someone inside them is sending out tachyon signals. The tachyons can burrow right out of those smaller universes. All the tachyons have to do is pass through the event horizon of the closed-off microgeometry. Then they’re free. They escape from the gravitational singularities and we can pick them up.”

  Peterson frowned. “These… microuniverses… are other other places to live? They might be inhabited?”

  Markham grinned. “Sure.” He had the serene confidence of a man who has worked through the mathematics and seen the solutions. There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities—potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry—that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics. Markham saw in Peterson’s face the hesitant puzzlement that swam over people when they struggled to visualize ideas beyond the comforting three dimensions and Euclidean certainties which framed their world. Behind the equations were immensities of space and dust, dead but furious matter bending to the geometric will of gravity, stars like match heads exploding in a vast night, orange sparks that lit only a thin ring of child planets. The mathematics was what made it all; the pictures men carried inside their heads were useful but clumsy, cartoons of a world that was as subtle as silk, infinitely smooth and varied. After you had seen that, really seen it, the fact that worlds could exist within worlds, that universes could thrive within our own, was not so huge a riddle. The mathematics buoyed you.

  Markham said, “I think that may be an explanation for the anomalous noise level. It’s not thermally generated at all, if I’m right. Instead, the noise comes from tachyons. The indium antimonide sample isn’t just transmitting tachyons, it’s receiving them. There’s a tachyon background we’ve neglected.”

  “A background?” Renfrew asked. “From what?”

  “Let’s see. Try the correlator.”

  Renfrew made a few adjustments and stepped back from the oscilloscope. “That should do it.”

  “Do what?” Peterson demanded.

  “This is a lock-in coherence analyzer,” Markham explained. “It culls out the genuine noise in the indium sample—sound wave noise, that is—and brings up any signals out of the random background.”

  Renfrew stared intently at the oscilloscope face. A complex wave form wavered across the sca
le. “It seems to be a series of pulses strung out at regular intervals,” he said. “But the signal decays in time.” He pointed at a fluid line which faded into the noise level as it neared the right side of the screen.

  “Quite regular, yes,” Markham said. “Here’s one peak, then a pause, then two peaks together, then nothing again, then four nearly on top of each other, then nothing. Strange.”

  “What do you trunk it is?” Peterson asked.

  “Not ordinary background, that’s clear,” Renfrew answered.

  Markham said, “It’s coherent, can’t be natural.”

  Renfrew: “No. More like…”

  “A code,” Markham finished. “Let’s take some of this down.” He began writing on a clip-board. “Is this a real-time display?”

  “No, I just rigged it to take a sample of the noise for a hundred-microsecond interval.” Renfrew reached for the oscilloscope dials. “Would you like another interval?”

  “Wait till I copy this.”

  Peterson asked, “Why don’t you just photograph it?”

  Renfrew looked at him significantly. “We have no film. There’s a shortage and priority doesn’t go to laboratories these days, you know.”

  “Ian, take this down,” Markham interrupted.

  • • •

  Within an hour the results were obvious. The noise was in fact a sum of many signals, each overlaid on the rest. Occasionally a short stuttering group of pulses would appear, only to be swallowed in a storm of rapid jiggling.

  “Why are there so many competing signals?” Peterson asked.

  Markham shrugged. He wrinkled his nose in an unconscious effort to work his glasses back up. It gave him an unintentional expression of sudden, vast distaste. “I suppose it’s possible they’re from the far future. But the vest pocket universe sounds good to me, too.”

  Renfrew said, “I wouldn’t put much weight on a new astrophysical theory. Those fellows speculate in ideas like stock brokers.”

  Markham nodded. “Granted, they often take a grain of truth and blow it up into a kind of intellectual puffed rice. But this time they have a point. There are unexplained sources of infrared emission, far out among the galaxies. The microuniverses would look like that.” He made a tent of his fingers and smiled into it, his favorite academic gesture. At times like these it was comforting to have a touch of ritual to get you through. “That scope of yours shows a hundred times the ordinary noise you expected, John. I like the notion that we’re not unique, and there is a background of tachyon signals. Signals from different times, yes. And from those microscopic universes, too.”