Timescape Page 27

  “Mr. Smythe wants ours to remain a gentlemen’s establishment, where the customers don’t feel they’re under suspicion.”

  Peterson recalled a time when one could count on having rooms in college, and was given sherry when one went round to one’s tutor, and wore a white dinner jacket for the May Balls. Now all the colleges admitted women, and women shared rooms with the men if they liked, and there was even an all-gay college, and academic gowns weren’t required anywhere.

  She went on about how rude the students were today. He nodded, guessing that this was the sort of thing she expected he would like to hear. Not far wrong, actually. But it was her charm that interested him, not her opinions.

  He brought his mind to bear on the situation. It seemed like a straightforward problem in the timeless sexual game. Perhaps it was the predictability of it that explained his inattention to detail; he had to force himself to follow the thread of her talk. She wanted to get into films or maybe acting, check. A flat in London if she could only find some way to move, right. Cambridge was dull, unless you liked the dreadful academic sort of amusements. She felt something really did need fixing in the current political situation, but had no suggestions as to what that might be. No surprises, but she was awfully pretty and had a graceful way of moving.

  She accepted all of the vegetables that arrived in silver dishes, each in its own sauce. Probably didn’t get much variety at home, particularly since the French crop failures. He speculated for a moment about whether the Council should have stepped in on that one, ruling out the new techniques, and then pushed the subject back into place; no point in dwelling on past issues.

  Since he was having trouble focusing, he began directing the flow of talk. It was easy enough to work in a recent state function, slide a few names past at the right speed to be understood, but not so slowly that she would suspect he was dropping them in deliberately. Then he slipped in a reference to Charles and she blurted, “Do you really know the King?” Actually he was on respectful and professional terms with Charles, but had no hesitation in exaggerating the relationship as far as believable. He felt confident that she did not even notice the discreet gesture with which he ordered another half bottle from the wine waiter. She was getting slightly giggly now. He took advantage of it to try rather more risqué stories on her. At one point she covered her glass with her hand, protesting that she had had enough. He set the bottle down and started to tell her the salacious details behind the Duke of Shropshire’s recent divorce. He quickly got to the scene in court when the famous “headless” photo was produced. Lady Pringle had sworn it was the Duke, she would recognize him anywhere. The judge had asked to see the photo. He found it to be essentially a close-up of a man’s genitalia, though his companion’s face was clearly identifiable. Laura was giggling so helplessly that he felt sure she did not see him refill her glass. As he went on with how the judge had asked Lady Pringle how she could be so sure it was the Duke, he raised his glass and Laura imitated him unthinkingly. He let her swallow her wine before he told her Lady Pringle’s reply, which had so convulsed the court that the judge had had to order it cleared.

  He sat back and watched her. Things were going splendidly. She had abandoned her affected flirtatious attitude and, momentarily, her refined accent.

  “Oh, go on with you,” she said, her vowels sliding obliquely through a range of East Anglian diphthongs.

  The waiter had pushed a trolley of sickeningly elaborate French pastries to their table. As he expected, she chose the creamiest and attacked it with the unabashed eagerness of a schoolgirl.

  Over coffee she became earnest again, watching her vowels and pressing him about politics. She repeated the common newspaper cant about irresponsible corporations pushing questionable new products into the world without a thought for social impact. Peterson resigned himself to sitting through this standard lecture and then, without quite realizing it, found himself thinking aloud about matters he had shelved for a long time. “No, no, you’ve got it wrong,” he said suddenly. “The wrong turning came when we started going for the socially relevant research in the first place. We accepted the idea that science was like other areas, where you make a product and the whole thing can be run from the top down.”

  “Well, surely it can,” Laura said. “If the right people are at the top—”

  “There are no right people,” he said with energy. “That’s what I’m just now learning. See, we went to the senior scientists and asked them to pick the most promising fields. Then we supported those and cut the rest, to ‘focus our efforts.’ But the real diversity in science comes from below, not from innovative managers above. We narrowed the compass of science until nobody saw anything but the approved problems, the conventional wisdom. To save money we stifled imagination and verve.”

  “It seems to me what we have is too much science.”

  “Too much applied work without really understanding it, yes. Without pursuing the basics, you get a generation of technicians. That’s what we have now.”

  “More checking to see the unforeseen side effects—”

  “To see you must have vision,” he said earnestly. “I’m just beginning to catch on to that fact. All this talk of bloody ‘socially relevant’ work assumes a bureaucrat somewhere is the best judge of what’s useful. So now the problems are outstripping the can-do types, the folks with limited horizons, and, and…”

  He stopped, puzzled with himself at this outburst. It had altered the carefully cultivated tone of the evening, perhaps fatally. Maybe spending the day with Renfrew had done it. For a moment there he had been arguing fervently against the very point of view that had brought him so rapidly to the top.

  He took a long pull of coffee and chuckled warmly. “I rather got off the beam on that one, didn’t I? Must be the wine,” Properly played, the momentary outburst could be used to show that he was passionate about the world, involved, independent thinker, etc., all of which might well appeal. He set to work insuring that they did.

  • • •

  The moon was high above the trees. An owl swooped silently across the patch of sky above the clearing. Cautiously he slid his arm out from under her head and looked at his watch. Past midnight. Goddamn. He stood up and started dressing. She lay still, sprawled quite unself-consciously, legs flung wide as he had left her.

  She was lying on his jacket. He stooped to retrieve it and in the moonlight saw tears on her cheeks. Oh, shit. Surely he wasn’t going to have to cope with that too.

  “Better put your clothes on,” he said. “It’s getting late.”

  She sat up and fumbled with her dress. “Ian,” she began in a small voice, “that’s never happened to me before.”

  “Come on,” he said, not believing her. “You can’t tell me you were a virgin.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  He searched for her meaning. “You never—?”

  “I—not with a man—not like that—I never had—” She stumbled over her words, trailing off, embarrassed.

  So that was it. He didn’t help her out. He felt weary and impatient, unmoved by her implied compliment. It was a point of honor to satisfy them, no more. God knows she had taken long enough over it. Still, it had been a better job than that Japanese nymphomaniac in La Jolla, Kiefer’s wife. There was now an unpleasant twinge when he thought of her. He had done the usual—indeed, more. She had come again and again and seemed insatiable. There had been a kind of feverish clutching to her, a thing he had noticed in many women lately. But that was their problem, not his. He sighed and pushed away the memory.

  He shook out his jacket, brushing away blades of grass. She was silent now, still fiddling with the tie on her dress, probably trying to make it into the same bow she’d left home with. He led the way from the clearing, empty of any further desire to touch her. When she slipped a hand into his he thought it polite to let it stay there; he would be coming to Cambridge again, after all. Absent-mindedly he scratched a midge bite on his neck that he’
d collected while tussling in the grass. Tomorrow was going to be another long one. He flexed his shoulders. A cold ache had settled into the muscles at the base of his neck. Let’s see, there was the subcommittee meeting tomorrow, and some backup reading on the Sacred Cow War still sputtering along in India… He realized with a start that he was living slightly in the future these days, as an ingrained habit. At Renfrew’s he’d been distracted by thoughts of dinner and wine. At the restaurant he had watched Laura’s hair and thought how it might look fanned out across a crisp white pillow. Then, immediately after the act, his mind had drifted on to the next day and what he had to do. Christ, a donkey driven by the carrot.

  He was faintly surprised when they emerged from the damp woods into the moonlight and he remembered he was still in Cambridge.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  GREGORY MARKHAM WAS SURPRISED WHEN IAN Peterson appeared in the laboratory, striding purposefully down the lanes of electronic gear. After the usual greeting Greg said, “I would have imagined you didn’t have much time these days for secondary efforts like this.”

  Peterson looked around the bay. “I was in the neighborhood. I saw Renfrew a few days ago and have been busy since. Wanted to talk to you and see this new Wickham woman.”

  “Oh, about that. I don’t see the necessity of my going Stateside right away. There’s—”

  Peterson’s face hardened. “I’ve cleared your way with NSF and Brookhaven. I’ve done all I can from my end. I should think you’d no objection to running interference for Renfrew back there.”

  “Well, I don’t, but…”

  “Good. I’ll expect you on the flight tomorrow, as planned.”

  “I’ve got a lot of interesting theory to go over here, things Cathy brought—”

  “Take it with you.”

  Markham sighed. Peterson was not the easy-going breed of administrator popular in the US, open to suggestion even after a decision had been made. “Well, it will hold things up, but…”

  “Where’s Wickham?”

  “Ah, down that way. She came in yesterday and John’s still showing her around.”

  A slim, rather bony woman approached. “Just finished the tour,” she said to Markham. “Pretty impressive. I haven’t met you, I think,” she continued, turning her large brown eyes to Peterson.

  “No, but I know of you. Ian Peterson.”

  “So you’re the guy who got me strong-armed out here.”

  “More or less. You’re needed.”

  “I was needed in Pasadena, too,” she said grimly. “You must’ve lit a fire under some big honcho upstairs.”

  “I wanted to hear about these tachyons from subuniverses and so on.”

  “My, you must be used to getting what you want pretty damn fast.”

  “At times,” Peterson murmured lightly.

  “Well, I’ve got the lowdown from Greg and John here, and I think that noise just might have, well, cosmological origins. Maybe microuniverses, maybe distant Seyfert galaxies in our own universe. Hard to tell. Quasar cores can’t produce this much noise, that’s for sure. The data coming into Caltech and Kitt Peak seems to suggest there’s a lot of dark matter in our own. Enough to imply there are microuniverses, maybe.”

  “Enough to close off our geometry?” Greg put in. “I mean, above the critical density?”

  “Could be.” To Peterson she added, “If the density of dark matter is high enough, our universe will eventually collapse back in on itself. Cyclic cosmos and so on.”

  “Then there’s no way to avoid the noise in Renfrew’s experiment?” Peterson asked.

  “Probably not. It’s a serious problem for John, who’s trying to focus a beam in spite of all the spontaneous emission this tachyon noise causes. But it’ll be no worry for 1963 or whatever. They’re just receiving; that’s a lot easier.”

  Peterson murmured a neutral, conversation-breaking reply and said that he had to make some calls. He departed quickly, seeming rather distracted. “Funny guy,” Cathy said.

  Markham leaned against the computer console. “He’s the man who opens the cash register. Humor him.”

  She smiled. “I’m amazed you got funding for all this—” a sweep of the arm. Her eyes moved, studying his face. “Do you really think you can change the past?”

  Markham said reflectively, “Well, I think Renfrew started out simply to get funding. You know, a practical icing on a cake that’s really fundamental and ‘useless.’ He never expected it to work. I thought it was good physics, too, and we were both surprised at Peterson’s interest. Now I’m coming to think that John was earnest from the first. Look, you’ve seen the equations. If an experiment doesn’t produce a causal loop, it’s allowed. That’s open and shut.”

  Cathy sat in a lab chair and rocked back, putting her feet up on the console. The skin seemed stretched thin across her cheekbones, dry and papery, lined by sun and fatigue. Jet-lag shadows made crescents under her eyes. “Yeah, but those heating-up experiments you did first… That’s one thing, simple stuff. With people involved, though—”

  “You’re thinking about paradoxes again,” Markham said sympathetically. “Having people in the experiment introduces free will, and that leads to the problem of who’s the observer in this pseudo-quantum-mechanical experiment, and so on.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And this experiment works. Remember Peterson’s bank message.”

  “Yeah. But sending this ocean stuff—what would success be like? We wake up one day and that bloom is gone?”

  “We’re thinking in paradox-making channels again. You’re separating yourself from the experiment. The old classical observer, sort of. See, things don’t have to be causal, they only have to be self-consistent.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know what the new field equations say about that. Here’s a copy of my paper on the coupled solutions, maybe you…”

  “Combining quantum-mechanical supersymmetry and general relativity? With tachyons in?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey, that’s worth looking at.” Markham brightened.

  “A lot of the old features are still in these equations, I can tell that much. Every quantum-mechanical event—that is, involving tachyons in a paradox-producing loop—still leads to a kind of scattering into a family of event-probabilities.”

  “A wave pattern between past and future. The light switch hung up between ‘on’ and ‘off.’”

  “Yes.”

  “So we still get probabilistic predictions. No certainties.”

  “I think so. Or at least, the formalism has that part in it. But there’s something else… I haven’t had time to figure it out.”

  “If there were time to think…” Markham puzzled over the neatly typed pages of equations. “Interpreting this is the hard part. The mathematics is so new…”

  “Yeah, I sure as hell wish that guy Peterson hadn’t yanked me away from Caltech. Thorne and I were on the verge—” Her head jerked up. “Say, how did Peterson know about me? You tell him?”

  “No. I didn’t know you were working on this.”

  “Ummmm.” Her eyes narrowed. Then she shrugged. “He’s got some power, that much I can tell. Seems like a typical English prig.”

  Markham looked uncomfortable. “Well, I don’t know…”

  “Okay, okay, put that down to my jet lag. The flight was packed, too. Jesus, I wish Peterson had held off a week or so.”

  Markham saw Peterson emerge from where Renfrew was working, and signaled to Cathy. She put on a bland, faintly comical face. Markham hoped Peterson wouldn’t notice.

  “Just talked to my staff,” Peterson said, hitching thumbs into his waistcoat as he approached. “I had them look into the people who were working at NMR at Columbia, Moscow, and La Jolla around 1963. Biographies and so on.”

  Markham said, “Yes, that’s an obvious thing to check, isn’t it? Trust Ian to cut through all this physics and try something simple.”

  “Ummmm.” Peterson glanced at Markham,
eyebrow lifting microscopically. “Staff haven’t much time, with all that’s going, on. They turned up nothing obvious, like papers in the scientific journals. There was something about ‘spontaneous resonance’ that never reappeared—seems to have been a red herring—but nothing about tachyons or messages. One chap did stumble on a piece in New Scientist about messages from space, though, and credited an NMR chap named Bernstein. There’s a reference to some television appearance, along with a life-in-the-universe type.”

  “Can your staff dig that out?” Cathy asked.

  “Perhaps. A lot was lost with the Central Park nuke, I’m told. The network files were in Manhattan. News programs 35 years old aren’t kept in multiple copies, either. I’ve put a woman to searching, but Sir Martin’s got a crash program going on this—” He broke off suddenly.

  “You think it was this Bernstein who left that note in the bank?” Markham asked.

  “Possibly. But if that is all the effect Renfrew’s beams have had, the ocean information hasn’t got through.”

  Markham shook his head. “Wrong tense. We can still keep transmitting; if one message made it, others can.”

  “Free will again,” Cathy said.

  “Or free won’t,” Peterson said mildly. “Look here, I’ve got to go into Cambridge, see to a few matters. Could you give me a briefing on your work, Cathy, before I go?”

  She nodded. Markham said, “Renfrew’s having a little party tonight. He means to invite you, I know.”

  “Well…” Peterson looked at Cathy. “I’ll try to come round. Don’t absolutely have to be back in London until tomorrow.”

  He and Cathy Wickham went into Renfrew’s small office, to use the blackboard. Markham watched them talking through the clear glass paneling of the door. Peterson seemed caught up in the physics of the tachyons, and had largely forgotten the supposed usefulness of them. The two figures moved back and forth before the board, Cathy making diagrams and symbols with quick swoops of the chalk. Peterson studied them, frowning. He seemed to be watching her more than the board.