Timescape Page 3

The man fell back a step. She seized the bucket of chicken feed, not wanting to leave anything out that he might steal. The key turned easily, thank God, and she slammed the door just as he came up on the step. She snapped the lock home. He shouted through the door: “You bleedin’ stuck-up tart. Don’t fucking care if we starve, do you?”

  Marjorie began to shake all over, but she shouted back, “I’m going to call the police if you don’t leave at once!”

  She walked through the house, eying the windows. They would be so easy to break. She felt vulnerable, trapped in her own house. Her breathing was very fast and shallow now. She felt nauseated. The man was still shouting outside, his language becoming more and more obscene.

  The phone was on the hall table. She picked it up and held it to her ear. Nothing. She pressed the receiver bar up and down a few times. Nothing. Damn, damn, damn. What a time for it to go out. It happened often, of course. But not now, please, she prayed. She shook the phone. Still silence. She was completely cut off. What if the man broke in? Her mind raced over potential weapons, the poker, the kitchen knives—Oh God, no, better not start any violence, there were two of them and the man looked a nasty customer. No, she would go out the back. Through the French windows in the living room. Run to the village for help.

  She couldn’t hear him shouting any longer, but was afraid to show herself at the window to see if he were still there. She tried the phone again. Still nothing. She slammed it down. She focused her attention on the doors and windows, listening for sounds of a break-in. Then the knocking started again at the front door. It was a relief to know where he was and that he was still outside. She waited, gripping the edge of the hall table. Go away, damn you, she willed him. The knocking repeated. After a pause, steps crunched on the gravel. Was he going away at last? Then there was a knock at the kitchen door. Oh Christ! How could she get rid of him?

  “Marjorie! Hello, Marjorie, are you there?” A voice hailed her.

  Relief flooded her and she felt close to tears. She was too limp to move.

  “Marjorie! Where are you?” The voice was moving away. She straightened up and went to the kitchen door and opened it.

  Her friend Heather was moving off towards the garden shed. “Heather!” she called. “I’m here.”

  Heather turned and came back to her. “Whatever’s the matter? You look awful,” she said.

  Marjorie stepped outside and looked around. “Has he gone?” she asked. “There was a dreadful man here.”

  “A shabby-looking man with a woman and child? They were just leaving when I came. What happened?”

  “He wanted to borrow some milk.” She started to laugh, a little hysterically. It sounded so ordinary. “Then he got rude and started shouting. They’re squatters. Moved into that empty farm down the road last night.” She sank into a kitchen chair. “God, that was scary, Heather.”

  “I believe it. You look quite shaken. Not like you, Marjorie. I thought you could handle anything, even fierce and dangerous squatters.” She had adopted a bantering tone and Marjorie responded to it.

  “Well, I could, of course. I was going to bash him over the head with the poker and then stick him with a kitchen knife, if he broke in.”

  She was laughing, but it wasn’t funny. Had she actually thought of doing that?

  CHAPTER THREE

  FALL, 1962

  HE HAD TO FIND A WAY TO GET RID OF THE DAMNED noise in the experiment, Gordon thought moodily, picking up his scuffed briefcase. The damned stuff wouldn’t go away. If he couldn’t find the difficulty and correct it, then the whole experiment ended up sucking wind.

  The palm tree still stopped him every time. Each morning, after Gordon Bernstein had slammed the yellow front door of the bungalow a little too loudly, he turned and looked at the palm tree and stopped. The pause was a moment of recognition. He was really here, in California. Not a movie set; the real thing. The palm tree silhouette thrust spearing fronds into a cloudless sky, silently exotic. This matter-of-fact plant was far more impressive than the strangely blank freeways or the unrelentingly balmy weather.

  Most evenings, Gordon sat up late with Penny, reading and listening to folk records. Things were exactly like his years at Columbia. He kept the same habits, and very nearly forgot that half a block away was Windansea Beach with its rolling surf. When he left his windows open, the rumble of the waves seemed like the traffic noise on 2nd Avenue, a distant blur of other people’s lives that he had always successfully avoided, there in his apartment. So it came as a small shock each morning when he ventured out, jiggling his car keys nervously, mind mumbling away to itself, and the palm tree yanked him back into this new reality.

  Weekends, it was easier to remember that this was California. Then he would wake to see Penny’s long blond hair fanned out over the pillow beside him. During the week she had early classes and left while he was still asleep. She moved so lightly and quietly that she never disturbed him. Each morning, it was as though she had never been there. She left nothing lying around. There wasn’t even a dent in the bed where she had slept.

  Gordon slipped the tinkling keys into his pocket and walked along a bottlebrush hedge and out into the broad boulevards of La Jolla. This, too, was still a little strange to him. The streets had ample room to park his ’58 Chevy and leave immense stretches of concrete for the two center lanes. The streets were as big as the building lots; they seemed to define the landscape, like vast recreation grounds for the dominant species, automobiles. Compared to 2nd Avenue, which was more like a ventilating shaft between slabs of brown brick, this was extravagant excess. In New York, Gordon had always braced himself when he went down the steps, knowing that when he pushed open the front door of wired glass there would be dozens of people within sight. They would be briskly moving along, a churn of lives. He could always count on that press of flesh around him. Here, nothing. Nautilus Street was a flat white plain baking in the morning sun, unpeopled. He climbed into his Chevy and the roar of starting the engine cracked the silence, seeming to conjure up in his rear view mirror a long low Chrysler which came over the rise a block away and went by, making a swishing noise.

  On the way to the campus he drove with one hand and spun the radio dial with the other, rummaging through the discordant blocks of sound that passed for pop music out here. He preferred folk music, really, but had an odd affection for some old Buddy Holly songs and lately had found himself humming them in the shower—Every day it’s a-gittin closer… Well that’ll be the day… He found a high-pitched Beach Boys number and let the dial rest. The tenor warblings about sand and sun described perfectly the travelogue views that swept by outside. He coasted down La Jolla Boulevard and watched the distant small dots that were riding in on a slowly broadening fan of white surf. Kids, unaccountably not in school, even though classes had started two weeks ago.

  He swooped down the hillside and into a pack of slowed cars, mostly big black Lincolns and Cadillacs. He eased down on the brake and noticed new buildings on Mount Soledad. The earth was scraped raw and terraced, trucks climbing over the ruined soil like insects. Gordon smiled tartly, knowing that even if he unsnarled the experiment, and produced a brilliant result, and got tenure, and therefore made a higher salary, he still could not afford the cedar and glass homes that would slant out from that hillside. Not unless he took on a lot of consulting on the side and rose quickly at the University to boot, perhaps wangling his way into a part-time deanship to boost the monthly check. But that was unlikely as hell.

  He grimaced behind his thick black beard, shifted the Chevy’s gears as the Beach Boys faded into a Dirt’s out, Tide’s in jingle, and the car surged through traffic with a rich, throaty growl, toward the University of California at La Jolla.

  • • •

  Gordon tapped absentmindedly on the dewar of liquid nitrogen, trying to think how to say what he wanted, and dimly realized that he just couldn’t like Albert Cooper. The guy seemed pleasant enough: sandy-haired, a slow talker who sometimes slurred his
words, obviously well muscled from his hobbies of scuba diving and tennis. But Cooper’s taciturn calm blunted Gordon’s momentum, time and again. His smiling, easygoing manner seemed to reflect some distant, bemused tolerance of Gordon, and Gordon found himself bristling.

  “Look, Al,” he said, turning rapidly away from the steaming nozzle of the dewar. “You’ve been with me well over a year, right?”

  “Check.”

  “You were doing pretty well with Professor Lakin, I joined the department, Lakin was too busy, so you shifted over to me. And I took you on.” Gordon rocked back on his heels, wedged his hands into his back pockets. “Because Lakin said you were good.”

  “Sure.”

  “And now you’ve been plugging away on this indium antimonide experiment for—what?—a year and a half, easy.”

  “Right,” Cooper said somewhat quizzically.

  “I think it’s time you canned the bullshit.”

  Cooper gave no visible reaction. “Ummmm. I don’t… uh… know what you mean.”

  “I come in here this morning. I ask you about the job I gave you. You tell me you went over every amplifier, every Varian component, the works.”

  “Uh huh. I did.”

  “And the noise is still there.”

  “I checked. Ran the whole sequence.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  Cooper sighed elaborately. “So you found out about it, huh?”

  Gordon frowned. “Found out what?”

  “I know you’re a stickler for carrying an experiment through, A to Z, with no delays, Dr. Bernstein. I know that.” Cooper shrugged apologetically. “But I couldn’t finish the whole thing last night. So I went out and had a few beers with the guys. Then I came back and did it all over.

  Gordon wrinkled his brow. “There’s nothing wrong with that. You can always take a break. Just so you keep everything steady, don’t let the preamps or the scopes go off their zero adjustments.”

  “No, they were still okay.”

  “Then—” Gordon spread his hands, exasperated. “—you’ve screwed up somewhere. It’s not the beer-drinking I care about, it’s the experiment. Look, the conventional wisdom is that it takes four years minimum to get out. Do you want to make it that fast?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then do what I say and don’t slack off.” “But I haven’t.”

  “You must’ve. You just haven’t looked. I can—”

  “The noise is still there,” Cooper said with a certainty that stopped Gordon in mid-sentence. Gordon abruptly realized that he had been browbeating this man, only three years younger, for no reason whatever, aside from frustration.

  “Look, I—” Gordon began, but found the next word catching in his throat. He felt suddenly embarrassed. “Okay, I believe you,” he said, making his voice brisk and businesslike. “Let’s see the chart recordings you took.”

  Cooper had been leaning against the blocky magnet that enclosed the kernel of their experiment. He turned and threaded his way through the lanes of cables and microwave guides. The experiment was still running. The silvery flask, suspended between the poles of the magnet and all but obscured by cable lead-ins, had grown a coat of ice. Inside it liquid helium frothed and bubbled, boiling away at temperatures only a few degrees above absolute zero. The ice was water frozen out from the air around the jacket, and it made an occasional snap as the equipment expanded and contracted to relieve stress. The brilliantly lit laboratory hummed with electronic life. A few meters away the sheer heat of the banks upon banks of transistorized diagnostics made a warming wall of air. From the helium, though, Gordon could feel a gentle, chilling draft. Despite the coolness Cooper wore a torn T-shirt and blue jeans. Gordon preferred a blue long-sleeve button-down shirt, Oxford broadcloth, with corduroy slacks that belted in the back, and a tweed jacket. He had not yet adjusted to the informality of laboratories here. If it meant going as far downhill as Cooper, he was certain he never would.

  “I took a lot of data,” Cooper said conversationally, ignoring the tension that had hung in the air only moments before. Gordon moved through the assembly of scopes and wheeled cabinets to where Cooper was methodically laying out the automatically recorded graphs. The paper was gridded in bright red, so that the green jiggling lines of the signal stood out, making the page almost three-dimensional from contrast.

  “See?” Cooper’s thick fingers traced the green peaks and valleys. “Here’s where the indium nuclear resonance should be.”

  Gordon nodded. “A nice fat peak, that’s what we should find,” he said. But there was only a chaos of narrow vertical lines, made as the recorder pen had rocked back and forth across the paper, under the action of random nudges.

  “Just hash,” Cooper murmured.

  “Yes,” Gordon admitted, feeling the air wheeze out of him as he said it, his shoulders sagging.

  “I got these, though.” Cooper laid out another green rectangle. It showed a mixed pattern. At the right was a clean peak, its sides smooth and untroubled. But the center and left of the page was a meaningless jumble of scratchings.

  “Damn,” Gordon whispered to himself. On these graphs the frequency of emissions from the indium antimonide sample increased from left to right. “The noise wipes out the high frequencies.”

  “Not always.”

  “Huh?”

  “Here’s another try. I took it just a few minutes after that one.”

  Gordon studied the third x-y output sheet. On this one there was a reasonably clear peak on the left side, at low frequencies, and then noise to the right. “I don’t get it.”

  “I sure don’t either.”

  “We’ve always got flat, constant noise before.”

  “Yep.” Cooper looked at him blankly. Gordon was the professor here; Cooper was tossing the riddle over to him.

  Gordon squinted, thinking. “We’re getting the peaks, but only part of the time.”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Time. Time,” Gordon muttered distantly. “Hey, the pen takes about, say, thirty seconds to move across the sheet, right?”

  “Well, we could change that, if you think—”

  “No, no, listen,” Gordon said rapidly. “Suppose the noise isn’t always there? In this one—” he shuffled back to the second sheet “—there was some source of noise when the pen was recording the low frequencies. About ten seconds later it vanished. Here—” he planted a stubby finger on the third x-y graph “—the hash started in as the pen reached high frequencies. The noise was returning.”

  Cooper wrinkled his brow. “But… I thought this was a steady state experiment. I mean, nothing changes, that’s the whole point. We keep the temperature low but constant. The scopes and amps and rectifiers are all warmed up and holding to pattern. They—”

  Gordon waved him into silence. “It’s nothing we are doing. We’ve spent weeks checking the electronics; that’s not malfunctioning. No, it’s something else, that’s my point.”

  “But what?”

  “Something from outside. Interference.”

  “How could—”

  “Who knows?” Gordon said with new energy. He began his characteristic nervous pacing. His shoe soles squeaked on the floor at every turn. “What’s happening is, there’s another source of signal in the indium antimonide. Or else the indium is picking up a time-varying input from outside the lab.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Hell, I don’t either. But something’s screwing up the nuclear resonance detection. We’ve got to track it down.”

  Cooper squinted at the erratic lines, as though measuring in his mind’s eye the alterations that had to be made to study the problem further. “How?”

  “If we can’t remove the noise, study it. Find out what it’s coming from. Is it occurring in all the indium antimonide samples? Does it filter in from some other lab here? Or is it something new? That sort of thing.”

  Cooper nodded slowly. Gordon framed a few quick circuit diagram
s on the back of one of the sheets, sketching in the components with a pencil. He could see fresh possibilities now. An adjustment here, a new piece of equipment there. They could borrow some components from Lakin down the hall, and probably talk Feher out of his spectrum analyzer for a day or two. Gordon’s pencil made a small scratching sound against the background chugging of roughing pumps and the pervasive hum of the electronics, but he heard nothing. The ideas seemed to come up out of him and squeeze through the pencil onto the page, jotted down almost before he had thought them through, and he felt that he was on the track of something in this noise problem. There might be a new structure hiding behind the data like big game in a dense thicket. He was going to find out; he was sure of that.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1998

  GREGORY MARKHAM CYCLED PAST THE FRAGRANT buildings devoted to Veterinary Medicine and swooped into the driveway of the Cavendish Laboratory. He liked the soft brush of moist air as he arced around the curves, shifting his weight in a careful rhythm. His aim was to find a minimum curve which would deposit him at the lab entrance, a geodesic for this particular local curvature of space. One last burst of pedaling and he dismounted at a respectable speed, trotting alongside, using the bike’s energy to roll it into one of the concrete wheelstands.

  He straightened his brown Irish jacket and took the steps two at a time, a habit which gave him the appearance of being always late for something. He absently pushed his glasses back up his nose, where they had worn a red mark, and combed fingers through his beard. It was a well-defined beard, following the conventional course along his sharp jaw from sideburns to moustache, but it seemed to get mussed every hour or so, as did his hair. He was puffing from the bike ride more than usual. Either he had put on some weight in the last week, he deduced, or the simple erosion of age had nicked a little deeper. He was fifty-two and kept in moderately good condition. Medical research had shown enough of a correlation between exercise and long life to keep him at it.