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  • • •

  He arrived home just after Penny, and found her changing clothes. He dumped his briefcase, carrying the cares of the day, into a corner. “Where to?” he asked.

  “Surf’s up.”

  “Christ, it’s getting dark.”

  “Waves don’t know that.”

  He sagged against the wall. Her energy staggered him. This was the facet of California he found hardest: the sheer physicality of it, the momentum.

  “Come with me,” she said, pulling on a French bikini brief and a T-shirt. “I’ll show you how. You can body surf.”

  “Uh,” he said, not wanting to mention that he had looked forward to a glass of white wine and the evening news. After all, he thought—and suddenly not quite liking the thought—there might be a followup on the Shriffer story.

  “Come on!”

  • • •

  At Windansea Beach he watched her carve a path down the slope of a descending wave and wondered at it: a frail girl, mastering a blunt board and harnessing the blind momentum of the ocean, suspended in air as though by some miracle of Newtonian dynamics. It seemed a liquid mystery, and yet he felt he should be unsurprised; it was, after all, classical dynamics. The gang from around the pump house was out in full force, riding their boards as they awaited the perfect oncoming toppling ton of water, brown bodies deft on the white boards. Gordon sweated through the remorseless routine of the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises, assuring himself that this was just as good as the obvious pleasure the surfers took in their splitting of the waves. The required situps and pushups done, he ran over the swaths of sand, puffing to himself and in a muzzy way trying to unscramble the events of the day. They refused his simple tug: the day would not break down into simple paradigm. He halted, gasping in the salt air, eyebrows dark and beaded with sweat. Penny walked forward on her board, perched in the thick air, and waved to him. Behind her the ocean cupped itself upright and caught her board in a smooth hand, tilting it forward. She teetered, wobbled, arms fanned the air: she fell. The soapy churn engulfed her. The slick white board tumbled forward, end over end, driven by momentum’s grasp. Penny’s head appeared, hair plastered like a cap to her head, blinking, teeth white and bared. She laughed.

  • • •

  As they dressed he said, “What’s for supper?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Artichoke salad, then pheasant, then a brandy trifle.”

  “I hope you can make all that.”

  “Okay, what do you want?”

  “I’m going out. I’m not hungry.”

  “Huh?” A dull dawning of surprise. He was hungry.

  “I’m going to a meeting.”

  “What for?”

  “A meeting. A rally, I guess.”

  “For what?” he persisted.

  “For Goldwater.”

  “What?”

  “You may have heard of him. He’s running for President.”

  “You’re kidding.” He stopped, foot in midair, halfway into his jockey shorts. Then, realizing how comical he must look, he stepped in and pulled them up. “He’s a simple-minded—”

  “Babbitt?”

  No, Sinclair Lewis wouldn’t have occurred to him. “Just leave it at simple-minded.”

  “Ever read The Conscience of a Conservative? He has a lot of things to say in there.”

  “No, I didn’t. But look, when you have Kennedy, with the test ban treaty and some really new ideas in foreign policy, the Alliance for Progress—”

  “Plus the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, that pig-eyed little brother of his—”

  “Oh, come on. Goldwater is just a pawn of big business.”

  “He’ll stand up to the communists.”

  Gordon sat down on their bed. “You don’t believe that stuff, do you?”

  Penny wrinkled her nose, a gesture Gordon knew meant her mind was set. “Who sent our men into South Vietnam? What about what happened to Cliff and Bernie?”

  “If Goldwater gets in there’ll be a million Cliffs and Bernies over there.”

  “Goldwater will win over there, not just fool around.”

  “Penny, the thing to do over there is cut our losses. Why support a dictator like Diem?”

  “All I know is, friends of mine are getting killed.”

  “And Big Barry will change all that.”

  “Sure. I think he’s solid. He’ll stop socialism in our country.”

  Gordon lay back on the bed, spouting a resigned whoosh of disbelief. “Penny, I know you think I’m some sort of New York communist, but I fail to see—”

  “I’m late already. Linda invited me to this cocktail party for Goldwater, and I’m going. You want to go?”

  “Good God, no.”

  “Okay, I’m going.”

  “You’re a literature student who’s for Goldwater? Come on”

  “I know I don’t fit your stereotypes, but that’s your problem, Gordon.”

  “Jeezus.”

  “I’ll be back in a few hours.” She combed back her hair and checked her pleated skirt and walked out of the bedroom, stiff and energetic. Gordon lay on the bed watching her leave, unable to tell whether she was serious or not. She slammed the front door so hard it rattled, and he decided that she was.

  • • •

  It was an unlikely match from the start. They had met at a wine and chips party in a beach cottage on Prospect Street, a hundred yards from the La Jolla Art Museum. (The first time Gordon went to the Museum he hadn’t noticed the sign and assumed it was simply another gallery, somewhat better than most; to call it and the Met both museums seemed a deliberate joke.) His first impression was of her assembled order: neat teeth; scrupulously clear skin; effortless hair. A contrast with the thin, conflicted women of New York he had seen, “encountered”—a favorite word, then—and finally been daunted by. Penny seemed luminous and open, capable of genuinely breezy talk, uncluttered with the delivered opinions of The New York Times or the latest graduate seminar on What Is Important. In a flowered cocktail dress with a square neckline, the straight lines mitigated by a curving string of pearls, her glowing tan emitted warm yellow radiations that seeped through him in the wan light, life from a distant star. He was well into a bottle of some rotgut red by that time and probably overestimated the magic of the occasion, but she did seem to loom in the shadowed babble of the room. In better lit circumstances they might not have hit it off. This time, though, she was quick and artful and unlike any woman he had ever met before. Her flat California vowels were a relief from the congested accents of the east, and her sentences rolled out with an easy perfection he found entrancing. Here was the real thing: a naturalness, a womanly fervor, a clarity of vision. And anyway, she had ample, athletic thighs that moved under the silky dress as though her whole body were constrained by the cloth, capable of joyful escape. He didn’t know much about women—Columbia’s notorious deficiency—and as he knocked back more wine and made more conversation he wondered at himself, at her, at what was happening. It was uncomfortably like a cherished fantasy. When they left together, climbed into a Volkswagen and stuttered away from the still-buzzing party, his breath quickened at the implications—which promptly came true. From there the times spent together, the restaurants mutually enjoyed, the records and books rediscovered, seemed inevitable. This was the canonical It. The one thing he had always known about women was that there had to be magic, and now here it was, unannounced, even rather shy. He seized it.

  And now in the metaphorical morning after, she had friends named Cliff and parents in Oakland and a liking for Goldwater. All right, he thought, so the details were not perfect. But maybe, in a sense, that was part of the magic, too.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  APRIL 15, 1963

  GORDON HAD BREAKFAST AT HARRY’S COFFEE SHOP on Girard, trying to read over his lecture notes and invent some problems for a homework set. It was difficult to work. The clatter of dishes kept intruding and a tinny radio played Kingston Tr
io songs, which he disliked. The only recent item in pop music he could tolerate was “Dominique,” an odd hit recorded by an angel-voiced Belgian nun. He was not in the mood for concentration on things academic, anyway. The San Diego Union writeup of Saul’s PR blitz had been worse than he’d expected, sensational beyond the bounds of reason. Several people in the department had tut-tutted him about it.

  He mulled this over as he drove up Torrey Pines, without reaching any conclusion. He was distracted by a weaving Cadillac with its headlights burning on high. The driver was the typical fortyish man wearing a porkpie hat and a dazed expression. Back in the late ‘50s, he remembered, the National Safety Council had made a big thing of that. On one of the national holidays they publicized the practice of driving with headlights on during the day, to remind everyone to drive safely. Somehow the idea caught on with the slow-is-safe drivers and now, years later, you would still see them meandering through traffic, certain that their slowness bestowed invulnerability, lights burning uselessly There was something about such reflex stupidity that never failed to irritate him.

  Cooper was in the lab already. Showing more industry as his candidacy exam approaches, Gordon thought, but then felt guilty for being cynical. Cooper did seem genuinely more interested now, quite possibly because the whole message riddle had been elevated out of his thesis.

  “Trying out the new samples?” Gordon asked with a friendliness fueled by the residue of guilt.

  “Yeah. Getting nice stuff. Looks to me like the added indium impurities did the trick.”

  Gordon nodded. He had been developing a method of doping the samples to achieve the right concentration of impurities and this was the first confirmation that several months of effort were going to pan out. “No messages?”

  “No messages,” Cooper said with obvious relief.

  A voice from the doorway began, “Say, uh, I was told…”

  “Yes?” Gordon said, turning. The man was dressed in droopy slacks and an Eisenhower jacket. He looked to be over fifty and his face was deeply tanned, as though he worked out of doors.

  “You Perfesser Bernstein?”

  “Yes.” Gordon was tempted to add one of his father’s old jokes, “Yes, I have that honor,” but the man’s earnest expression told him it wouldn’t go over.

  “I, I’m Jacob Edwards, from San Diego? I’ve done some work I think you might be interested in?” He turned every sentence into a question.

  “What kind of work?”

  “Well, your experiments and the message and all? Say, is this where you get the signals?”

  “Ah, yes.”

  Edwards ambled into the laboratory, touching some of the equipment wonderingly. “Impressive. Real impressive.” He studied some of the new samples laid out on the working counter.

  “Hey,” Cooper said, looking up from the x-y recorder. “Hey, those samples are coated with—shit!”

  “Oh, that’s okay, my hands were dirty anyway. You fellas got a lot of fine equipment in here? How you pay for it all?”

  “We have a grant from—but look, Mr. Edwards, what can I do for you?”

  “Well, I solved your problem, you know? I have, yeah.” Edwards ignored Cooper’s glare.

  “How, Mr. Edwards?”

  “The secret,” he said, looking secretive, “is magnetism.”

  “Oh.”

  “Our sun’s magnetism, that’s what they’re after?”

  “Who?” Gordon began to rummage through his mind for some way to get Edwards away from the equipment.

  “The people who’re sending you those letters? They’re coming here to steal our magnetism. It’s all that keeps the Earth going around the sun—that’s what I’ve proved.”

  “Look, I don’t think magnetism has anything to do—”

  “Your experiment here—” he patted the large field coils—“uses magnets, doesn’t it?”

  Gordon saw no reason to deny that. Before he could say anything Edwards went on, “They were drawn to your magnetism, Perfesser Bernstein. They’re exploring for more magnetism and now that they’ve found yours, they’re gong to come and get it.”

  “I see.”

  “And they’re going to take the sun’s magnetism, too.” He waved his hands and stared off at the ceiling, as though confronting a vision. “All of it. We’ll fall into the sun?”

  “I don’t think—”

  “I can prove all this, you know,” the man said calmly in an I’m-being-perfectly-reasonable tone. “I stand before you as the man who has cracked—cracked—the unified field riddle. You know? Where all the particles come from, and where these messages come from? I’ve done it?”

  “Jee-zus,” Cooper said sourly.

  Edwards turned on him. “Whacha mean by that, boy?”

  Cooper shot back, “Tell me, are they coming in flying saucers?”

  Edwards’ face clouded. “Who tole you that?”

  “Just a guess,” Cooper said mildly.

  “You got somethin’ you’re not tellin’ the newspapers?”

  “No,” Gordon cut in. “No, we don’t.”

  Edwards poked a finger at Cooper. “Then why’d he say—Ah!” He froze, looking at Cooper. “You’re not gonna tell the newspapers, are you?”

  “There is nothing—”

  “Not gonna tell about the magnetism at all, are you?”

  “We don’t—”

  “Well, you’re not keeping it for yourself! The unified magnetism theory is mine and you, you educated—” he struggled for the word he wanted, gave up and went on—“In your universities, aren’t gonna keep me from—”

  “There is no—”

  “—from goin’ to the newspapers and tellin’ my side of it. I’ve had some education, too, y’know, an’—”

  “Where did you study?” Cooper said sarcastically. “The Close Cover Before Striking Institute?”

  “You—” Edwards seemed suddenly congested with words, so many words he could not get them out one at a time. “You—”

  Cooper stood up casually, looking muscular and on guard. “Come on, fella. Move it.”

  “What?”

  “Out.”

  “You can’t have my ideas!”

  “We don’t want them,” Gordon said.

  “Wait’ll you see it in the newspapers. Just you wait.”

  “Out.” Cooper said.

  “You won’t get a peep at my magnetism motor, either. I was going to show you—”

  Gordon put his hands on his hips and walked toward the man, boxing him in with Cooper on one side and the only escape leading to the laboratory doorway. Edwards backed away, still talking. He glared at them and struggled for a last phrase to hurl, but his imagination failed him. Edwards turned, grumbling, and shouldered his way into the corridor outside.

  Gordon and Cooper looked at each other. “One of the laws of nature,” Gordon said, “is that half the people have got to be below average.”

  “For a Gaussian distribution, yeah,” Cooper said. “Sad, though.” He shook his head and smiled. Then he went back to work.

  • • •

  Edwards was the first, but not the last. They turned up at a steady rate, once the San Diego Union story was picked up by other newspapers. Some drove in from Fresno and Eugene, intent on unraveling the riddle of the messages, each sure he knew the answer before he saw the evidence. Some brought manuscripts they had written on their ideas about the universe in general, or a particular scientific theory—Einstein was a favorite, and refuting him the common theme—or, occasionally, on Gordon’s experiments. The notion of writing a supposedly learned treatise, using only a vague newspaper article as the sole source, bemused Gordon. Some of the visitors had even published their theses, using the private presses beloved of amateurs. They would present them to him, lovingly handing over bound bundles with lurid covers. Inside, a jumble of terms elbowed each other for room in sentences that led nowhere. Equations appeared by sleight of hand, festooned with new symbols like fresh Christmas tr
ee decorations. The theories, when Gordon took the time to listen, would begin and end in midair; they had no connection with anything else known in physics, and always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable. Most of the cranks seemed to think constructing a new theory involved only the invention of new terms. Along with “energy,” “field,” “neutrino,” and other common terms would appear “macron,” “superon,” and “fluxforce”—all undefined, all surrounded with the magic aura of the Believer.

  Gordon came to recognize them easily. They would come to his office or laboratory, or call him at home, and within a minute he could tell them from ordinary folk. The cranks always had certain buzz words that appeared early on. They would claim to have solved everything—to have wrapped up all known problems in one grand synthesis. “Unified theory” was a dead giveaway. Another was the sudden, unexplained appearance of the Believer Words such as “superon.” At first Gordon would laugh when this happened, joshing the crank with a casual manner, sometimes making a joke. But a third hallmark of the crank was his humorlessness. They never laughed, never backed down from their ramparts. Indeed, open display of ridicule would bring out the worst in them. They were uniformly sure that every working scientist was out to steal their ideas. Several warned him that they had already applied for a patent. (The fact that you can patent an invention but not an idea had passed them by.) At this point Gordon would try to contrive a graceful exit from the conversation; on the telephone this was easy; he just hung up. Cranks in person were not so simple. Resistance to their groundbreaking ideas inevitably led to open threats that they would—here there came the grim look, the reluctant decision that they must use the final, ultimate weapon—go immediately to the newspapers. Somehow, to them, the press was always the judge of things scientific. Since Gordon had been elevated to their attention by the San Diego Union, he would of course fear deeply any attack on his position in the same hallowed pages.

  Finally, Gordon developed defenses. On the telephone he was quick to hang up—so quick that he cut off his own mother once, when he did not recognize her voice and could not make out anything intelligible over the transcontinental static. Crank manuscripts and letters were equally easy He wrote a note saying that while the person’s ideas were “interesting” (a suitably non-judgmental term), they were beyond his competence, so he was unable to comment on them. This worked; they never replied. On-the-spot cranks were the worst. He learned to be abrupt, even rude. This got rid of most of them. The harder, persistent sort—such as Edwards—Gordon learned to derail, to gently deflect onto other matters. Then he would edge them toward the door, murmuring reassuring phrases—but never a promise to read a manuscript, attend a lecture, or vouch for a theory. That way lay further involvement and more wasted time. He would edge them toward the door and they would go—grudgingly, sometimes, but they would go.