He stopped, avoiding Penny’s hostile, rigid face, and looked down at the Brookside jug waiting forlornly in the trash for its destruction, incompletely used. He had seen Penny and Cliff with his mother’s eyes, his New York imprinting, and he knew that he had missed the whole point. The war talk had put him off balance, unsure of how to react, and now in some odd way he was taking it all out on Penny.
LOOK, he began, “I’m sorry, I…” He brought his hands halfway up into the space between them and then let them drop. “I want to go for a walk.”
Penny shrugged. He shouldered past her.
Outside, in the cool and salty air, fog shrouded the tops of the crusty old live oaks. He marched through this La Jolla of the night, his face a sheen of sudden sweat.
Two blocks over, on Fern Glen, a figure emerging from a house distracted him from the jumble of his thoughts. It was Lakin. The man glanced to each side, seemed satisfied, and slipped quickly into his Austin-Healey. In the house Lakin had left, Venetian blinds fluttered at a window, momentarily silhouetting a woman’s body in the light that seeped from behind her. Gordon recognized the place; it was where two women graduate students from Humanities lived. He smiled to himself as Lakin’s Healey purred away. Somehow this small evidence of human frailty cheered him.
He walked a long way, past sealed-up summer cottages with yellowed newspapers on their doorsteps, occasionally passing by huge homes still ablaze with light. Cliff and Laos and the sense in Cliff’s words of things real and important, muddy and grim—the thoughts chewed at him, all churned together in the layered fog with Penny and his distant, inevitable mother. Experimental physics seemed a toy, no better than a crossword puzzle, beside these things. A distant war could roll across an ocean and crash on this shore. He thought muzzily to Scripps Pier, which jutted out below the campus, used as a loading dock for men and tanks and munitions. But then he snorted to himself, sure the drink was now fuzzing his mind. Around him the tight pocket of La Jolla could not be threatened by a bunch of little guys running around in black pajamas, trying to topple the Diem government. It didn’t make any goddamn sense. He turned back toward home and Penny. It was easy to get overexcited about threats—Cliff, the Cong, Lakin. Waves could not batter down a coastline overnight. And dim ideas about Cubans dumping fertilizer into the Atlantic and killing the life there—yeah, it was all too unlikely, more of his paranoia, yeah, he was sure of that tonight.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
GORDON OPENED THE SAN DIEGO UNION AND SPREAD it out on the lab workbench. He wished immediately that he had taken the trouble to find a copy of the Los Angeles Times, because the Union in its usual country-bumpkin manner devoted a lot of space to the wedding between Hope Cooke, the recent Sarah Lawrence graduate, and Crown Prince Palden Thon-up Namgyal of Sikkim. The Union seemed all a-twitter that an American girl would marry a man who would become a maharajah, just any day now. The real news appeared only as a minor article on the front page: Davey Moore was dead. Gordon thumbed impatiently back to the sports page and was mollified to find a longer story. Sugar Ramos had knocked out Moore in the tenth round of their bout for the featherweight title, in Los Angeles. Gordon wished again that he had got tickets; the press of classes and research had made it slip his mind until they were all sold out. So Moore had died of a cerebral hemorrhage without regaining consciousness; another blot on boxing. Gordon sighed. There were the predictable comments from the predictable people, calling for an end to the whole sport. He wondered for a moment if they might be right.
“Here’s the new stuff,” Cooper said at his elbow.
Gordon took the data sheets. “More signal?”
“Yep,” Cooper said flatly. “I’ve been getting good resonance curves for weeks now, and all of a sudden—whacko.”
“You decoded it?”
“Sure. A lot of repetition in it, for some reason.”
Gordon followed Cooper over to Cooper’s working area, where the lab notebooks were spread out. He found himself hoping the results would be nonsense, simply interference. It would be much easier that way. He wouldn’t have to worry about any messages, Cooper could proceed on his thesis, Lakin would be happy. His life didn’t need any complication right now, and he had hoped the whole spontaneous resonance effect would go away. Their Physical Review Letters note had aroused interest and nobody in the field had criticized the work; maybe it was best to leave matters that way.
His hopes faded as he studied Cooper’s blocky printing.
TRANSWBPRY 7 FROM CL998 CAMBE19983ZX
RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2
RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2
RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2
The mystifying chant of letters and numbers ran on for three pages. Then it abruptly stopped and there followed:
SHOULD APPEAR AS POINT SOURCE IN TACHYON SPECTRUM 263 KEV PEAK CAN VERIFY WITH NMR DIRECTIONALITY MEASUREMENT FOLLOWS ZPASUZC AKSOWLP BREAKDOWN IN RECTANGULAR CO-ORDMZALS SMISSION FROM 19BD 1998COORGHQE
After this came nothing sensible. Gordon studied Cooper’s data. “The rest of this stuff looks like simple on and off. No code to it.” Cooper nodded, and scratched his leg beneath his cutaway jeans shorts. “Just dots and dashes,” Gordon muttered to himself. “Funny” Cooper nodded again. Gordon had noticed lately that Cooper now confined himself to taking the data and venturing no opinions. Perhaps the clash with Lakin had taught him that an agnostic posture was safer. Cooper seemed happy enough when he was getting conventional resonance signals; they were the field stones which would build his thesis.
“This earlier stuff—RA and DEC” Gordon stroked his chin. “Something astronomical about that…”
“Ummmm,” Cooper volunteered. “Maybe so.”
“Yes—Right Ascension and Declination. These are coordinates, fixing a point in space.”
“Huh. Could be.”
Gordon glanced at Cooper irritably. There was such a thing as playing cards too close to your vest. “Look, I want to look into this. Just keep on taking measurements.”
Cooper nodded and turned away, obviously relieved to be rid of the perplexing data. Gordon left the lab and went up two floors to 317, Bernard Carroway’s office. There was no answer to his knock. He went by the department office, leaned in and called, “Joyce, where is Dr. Carroway?” By convention, office personnel were called by their first names, while faculty always had a title. Gordon had always felt slightly uncomfortable about going along with the practice.
“The big one or the little one?” the dark-haired department secretary said, raising her eyebrows; she scarcely ever let them rest.
“Big one. In mass, not height.”
“Astrophysics seminar. It should be nearly over.”
He slipped quietly into the seminar as John Boyle was finishing a lecture; the green blackboards were covered with differential equations from Boyle’s new gravitation theory. Boyle finished with a flourish, mixing in a Scotsman’s joke, and the seminar broke up into rivulets of conversation. Bernard Carroway heaved himself up and led a discussion between Boyle and a third man Gordon didn’t know. He leaned over and asked Bob Gould, “Who’s that?” Gordon nodded at the tall, curly-haired man.