Working this way, standing up amid the careless tangle of the ongoing experiment and scribbling in a notebook, calmed him. For a moment he was again back at Columbia, a son of Israel loyal to Newton’s cause. But then he had checked the last of Cooper’s numbers and there was nothing more to do. The moment passed. He sank back into the world.
“Do you have the summary I asked you to write up for your candidacy exam?” he asked Cooper.
“Oh, yeah. Almost done. I’ll get it to you tomorrow.”
“Good. Good.” He hesitated, not wanting to leave. “Say, ah—you haven’t got anything but conventional resonance curves? No—”
“Message?” Cooper smiled very slightly. “No, no message.”
Gordon nodded, looked around absently, and left.
He did not return to his office, but instead took as roundabout route to the Physical Sciences Library. It was on the ground floor of Building B and had a diffused, temporary air. Everything at UCLJ felt that way, compared to Columbia’s hallowed corridors, and now there was talk that even the campus name would change. La Jolla was being annexed by the jumble of San Diego. The city council spoke of the savings in fire and police protection, but to Gordon it seemed one more step in the steady homogenizing, the Losangelization of what had before been pleasant and charming distinctions. So UCLJ would become UCSD and something more than a mere name would be lost.
He spent an hour browsing through the new crop of physics journals and then looked up a few references relating to a back-burner idea he had let fall by the wayside. After a while he had no more real business and lunch was still an hour away. Somewhat reluctantly he returned to his office, not going up to the third floor to collect the morning mail but instead walking between the Physics and Chemistry buildings, passing under the architect’s wet dream of a connecting bridge. The graceful pattern of linked hexagons caught the eye, he had to give it that. Somehow, though, it looked uncomfortably like the scaffolding for some enormous insect’s burrow, a design pattern for a future wasp nest.
He was unsurprised to see his office door open, for he usually left it that way. The one distinction he had noted in the behavior pattern of humanists vs. scientists was the matter of doors: humanists closed them, discouraging casual encounters. Gordon wondered if this had a deep psychological significance, or, more likely, was meant by the humanists to conceal when they were on campus. As nearly as Gordon could tell, the answer was: seldom. They all seemed to work at home.
Isaac Lakin was standing in Gordon’s office, back to the door, studying the wasp’s scaffolding that loomed above. “Oh, Gordon,” he murmured, turning, “I’ve been looking for you.”
“I can imagine why.”
Lakin sat on the edge of Gordon’s desk; Gordon remained standing. “Oh?”
“The Shriffer thing.”
“Yes.” Lakin gazed up at the fluorescents and pursed his lips, as though carefully selecting the right words.
“It got out of hand,” Gordon said helpfully.
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
“Shriffer said he would keep me and UCLJ out of the news. The sole aim was to circulate that drawing.”
“Well, it’s done more than that.”
“How so?”
“I’ve had a number of calls. So would you, if you stayed in your office.”
“Who from?”
“Colleagues. People working in the nuclear resonance community. They all want to know what’s going on. So, I might add, do I.”
“Well—” Gordon summarized the second message and how Shriffer got involved. “I’m afraid Saul took things further than they should properly have gone, but—”
“I would say so. Our contract monitor called, as well”
“So what?”
“So what? True, he does not have very much real power. But our colleagues do. They pass judgment.”
“Again, so what?”
Lakin shrugged. “You will have to deny Shriffer’s conclusions.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Because they are false.”
“I don’t know that.”
“You should not make statements you cannot prove to be true.”
“But to deny them is also untrue.”
“You consider his hypothesis likely?”
“No.” Gordon shuffled uneasily. He had hoped he would not have to say anything, one way or the other.
“Then refuse to go along with it.”
“I can’t deny we got that message. It came through loud and clear.”
Lakin raised his eyebrows with a European disdain, as though to say, How can I reason with a person such as this? In response, Gordon unconsciously hitched at his pants and hooked his thumbs into his belt at his hips, flexing his shoulders. Absurdly, he had a sudden image of Marlon Brando in the same pose, squinting at some thug who had just crossed him. Gordon blinked and tried to think of what to say next.
“You realize,” Lakin said carefully, “that talk of a message will—aside from making you appear a fool—cast doubt on the spontaneous resonance effect?”
“Maybe.”
“Some of my telephone calls were specifically about precisely this point.”
“Maybe.”
Lakin glanced at Gordon sharply. “I believe you should reflect upon it.”
Gordon murmured impishly, “To shine is better than to reflect.”
Lakin stiffened. “What are you—”
The telephone rang. Gordon seized it with relief. He answered the caller in monosyllables. “Fine. Three o’clock, then. My office number is 118.”
When he hung up he looked levelly at Lakin and said, “San Diego Union”
“A dreadful paper.”
“Granted. They want some background on the story.”
“You’re seeing them?”
“Sure.”
Lakin sighed. “What will you say?”
“I’ll tell them I don’t know where the hell the stuff if coming from.”
“Unwise. Unwise.”
After Lakin had left Gordon wondered at the sudden phrase that had forced its way into his mouth: To shine is better than to reflect. Where had he heard it before? Penny, probably; it sounded like some literary remark. But did he mean it? Was he after fame, like Shriffer? He was conditioned to accept a certain amount of guilt over something like that—that was the cliché, wasn’t it, Jews feel guilty, their mothers train them to? But guilt wasn’t it, no; his intuition told him that. His instinct was that something lurked in the message, it was real. He had been over this ground a hundred times and still he had to trust his own judgment, his own data. And if to Lakin the subject was foolish, if Gordon appeared to be a fraud—well, tough; so be it.
He hitched his thumbs into his belt and gazed out at the California insect engineering and felt good, pretty damn good.
After the San Diego Union reporter went away Gordon still felt confident, though with some effort. The reporter asked a lot of dumb questions, but that was par for the course. Gordon stressed the uncertainties; the Union wanted clear answers to cosmic questions, preferably in one quotable sentence. To Gordon the important point was how science was done, how answers were always provisional, always awaiting the outcome of future experiments. The Union expected adventure and excitement and more evidence of a university on its way to greatness. Across this gulf some information flowed, but not much.