“It comes and goes, though,” Renfrew observed. “I can still transmit a fraction of the time.”
“Good,” Peterson said. He had not spoken for some while. “Keep on with it, then.”
Renfrew said, “I hope the fellows back in 1963 haven’t got the detector sensitivity to study this noise. If they stick to our signals—which should stand out above this background, when we’re transmitting properly—they’ll be all right.”
“Greg,” Peterson mused, his eyes remote, “there’s another point.”
“Oh? What?”
“You keep talking about the small universes inside ours and how we’re overhearing their tachyon messages.”
“Right.”
“Isn’t that a bit self-centered? How do we know we, in turn, are not a vest pocket universe inside somebody else’s?”
Gregory Markham slipped away from the Cav in early afternoon. Peterson and Renfrew were still unable to resist sniping at each other. Peterson was obviously drawn to the experiment, despite his automatic habit of distancing himself. Renfrew appreciated Peterson’s support, but kept pushing for more. Markham found the ornate dance between the two men comic, all the more so because it was virtually unconscious. With their class-calibrated speech patterns, the two men had squared off at the first differing vowel. If Renfrew had stayed a laborer’s son he would have got along smoothly with Peterson, each knowing his time-ordained role. As a man swimming in exotic academic waters, however, Renfrew had no referents. Science had a way of bringing about such conflicts. You could come out of nowhere and make your mark, without having learned any new social mannerisms. Fred Hoyle’s stay at Cambridge had been a case in point. Hoyle had been an astronomer in the old mold of eccentric-seeker-after-truth, advancing controversial theories and sweeping aside the cool, rational mannerisms when they didn’t suit his mood. Renfrew might well prove as remarkable as Hoyle, a working-class salmon swimming upstream all the way, if this experiment went through. Most rising scientists from obscure backgrounds nowadays kept a neutral, bland exterior; it was safer. Renfrew didn’t. The big modern research teams depended for progress on well-organized, smooth-running, large-scale operations, whose stability demanded a minimum of upsetting—what was the jargon—“interpersonal relationships.” Renfrew was a loner with a sandpaper psyche. The odd point was that Renfrew was quite civil towards most people; only the deliberate flaunting of class symbols by such as Peterson set him off. Markham had watched class friction worsen in England for decades, catching glimpses on his occasional visits, lime seemed to strengthen the ties of class, much to the confusion of the condescending Marxists who tended the lumbering government programs. The explanation seemed clear to Markham: in the steepening economic slide, following on the rich years of North Sea oil, people stressed differences, in order to keep alive their sense of self-worth. Us against Them stirred the blood. Better to play that distracting, antique game than to face the gray grip of a closing future.
Markham shrugged, mulling this over, and walked along the Coton footpath back toward the solemn spires of town. He was an American and thus exempt from the subtle class rituals, a visitor given a temporary passport. A year here had accustomed him to the language differences; now phrases like “the committee are” and “the government have” didn’t cause a stumble as the eye slid through the sentence. He now recognized Peterson’s skeptical arch of the eyebrow and rising, dry, “Hmmmm?” as a well-honed social weapon. The graceful, adroit sound of Peterson’s “lehzure” and “shedule” were certainly far better than the mechanical quack-quack of American administrators, who would call any information an “input,” were always “addressing a problem,” submitted proposals as a “package” but didn’t always “buy it,” and who engaged in “dialogue” with audiences; if you objected to such deliberately clanky talk, they answered that this was “only semantics.”
Markham thrust his hands into his jacket pockets and tramped on. He had been irked by a balky calculation in mathematical physics for days now, and wanted a long, solitary walk to help sweep his irritation away. He passed a construction site, where over-ailed chimps carried stonework and did the odd heavy job. Remarkable, what the tinkering with the DNA had done in the last few years.
As he approached a bus queue something caught his attention. A black man in tennis shoes was standing at the end of the line, eyes dancing, his head jerking as if on wires. Markham came up close to him and muttered, “Bobby round the corner,” and moved on. The man froze. “Huh? Wha?” He looked wildly around. He eyed Markham. A hesitation, then he decided—he raced off in the opposite direction. Markham smiled. The standard tactic was to wait until the bus hauled up and the queue’s attention was focused on getting aboard. Then you grabbed purses away from a few women and left in high gear. Before the crowd could redirect its attention you were streets away. Markham had seen the same maneuver in Los Angeles. He realized, a bit ruefully, that he might not have recognized the setup if the man hadn’t been black.
He strolled down the High Street. Beggars’ hands appeared magically when they saw his American jacket, and then disappeared quickly as he scowled. On the corner of St. Andrews and Market streets was Barrett’s barber shop, a faded sign proclaiming, “Barrett is willing to shave all, and only, men unwilling to shave themselves.” Markham laughed. This was a Cambridge insiders’ joke, a reference to the local logical trickery of Bertrand Russell and the mathematicians of a century ago. It yanked him back towards the problem that was bothering him, the tangle of reason surrounding Renfrew’s experiments.
The obvious question was, “But what about Barrett? Who can shave poor old Barrett?” If Barrett were willing to shave himself, and if the sign were true, then he was not willing to shave himself. And if Barrett wouldn’t shave himself, then according to his sign he was willing to shave himself. Russell had devised this paradox, and tried to solve it by inventing what he called a “meta-sign” which said, “Barrett shall be excluded from the class of all men to whom the first sign refers.” That sewed up the problem nicely for Barrett, but in the real world things weren’t so easy. Peterson’s suggestion this morning, about not sending the message about the bank, had disturbed Markham more than he had wanted to show. The trouble with the whole tachyon theory was that the causal loop idea didn’t fit our own perception of time as moving forward. What if they didn’t send the bank message? The neat little loop, with arrows passing from future to past and back again, was flawed. It didn’t have any human beings in it. The aim of a modern physical theory was to talk about reality as independent of the observer—at least, as long as quantum mechanics was left out. But if Peterson was in the causal loop, he had the ability to change his mind at any time, and change the whole damn thing. Or did he? Markham paused, looking through the filmed glass at a boy getting his amber hair cut. Where was human free will in this puzzle?
The equations were mute. If Renfrew succeeded, how would the things around them change? Markham had a sudden, sinking vision of a world in which the ocean bloom simply had not happened. He and Renfrew and Peterson would emerge from the Cav to find that no one knew what they were babbling about. Ocean bloom? We solved that ages ago. So they would be madmen, a curious trio sharing a common delusion. Yet to be consistent, the equations said that sending the message couldn’t have too great an effect. It couldn’t cut off the very reason for sending the tachyons in the first place. So there had to be some self-consistent picture, in which Renfrew still got his initial idea, and approached the World Council, and yet…