At this point Dyson became wistful, as though he could sense Orion slipping from him. The newspapers brought daily reports of agreements on the Nuclear Test Ban; Washington rumor said it would be signed within months. If so, even Orion’s small dose of radioactives would be ruled out. Toward the end of the hour, after the equations and graphs, there came a bittersweet quality. History would pass Orion by. It might someday fly above the atmosphere, once men had a safe way to get it into orbit with chemical rockets. But even then, much of the debris would eventually find its way down into the air. Maybe there was no completely safe way to harness our gift for making bombs. Maybe there were no shortcuts to the planets.
The applause which greeted Dyson’s somber conclusion was prolonged. He bowed tentatively toward his audience, smiling with sad eyes.
Gordon gave the last Colloquium of the year. The audience was even larger than Dyson’s of the week before, and noisier. Gordon opened with details of the experiment, history of the field, slides of the normal resonance lines. He had compiled all Cooper’s conventional results to date, and showed how these confirmed the usual theory. It was a satisfactory but relatively unexciting discussion. Gordon had considered leaving matters at that—no reference to the messages, no risks. But something made him cut short the parade of slides. He murmured, “However, there are some unusual features in the noise observed in our work”—and he was off, describing the interruptions of Cooper’s resonance curves, their suspicion that a pattern lay underneath, then the first decoding. Gordon used the viewgraph projector, sliding the transparent sheets into view as he spoke, his sentences coming quicker now, the words more clipped, a certain momentum coming into his voice. He showed the breakdown of the first message. He discussed the chances that such a message could be a fluke, an accident. From the crowded room there arose a sustained murmur. He described their efforts to track down a local source for the noise, their failure, and then the second message. Gordon made no mention of Saul and the 29-by-53 grid; he simply displayed the data. The RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2 chart filled an entire viewgraph. Only then did Gordon mention “spontaneous resonance,” giving Isaac Lakin full credit for the term and the idea. He kept his face blank and his voice flat and calm as he described “spontaneous resonance,” gave the statistical probability of such an effect arising from random noise, and left the rows of RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2 on the viewgraph as mute testimony. In dry, precise tones he told of their precautions against outside signals, of the waxing and waning of the “spontaneous resonance”—now he used the term archly, pausing before and after the words as if to put verbal quotation marks around them, smiling very slightly—and he paced back and forth before the blackboards, trying to remember the measured way Dyson had done it, head tilted down.
The voice came out of the audience. Before the first sentence was finished, heads turned to see the speaker. It was Freeman Dyson. “You realize, I suppose, that Saul Shriffer has made much of this? Of 99 Hercules?”
“Ah, yes,” Gordon said, stunned. He had not seen Dyson in the crowd. “I, I did not authorize him to…”
“And that no one at 99 Hercules could possibly be responding to our commercial radio stations yet? It is too far away.”
“Well, yes.”
“So if this is a message from there, they must be using communication faster than light?”
The auditorium was silent. “Yes.” Gordon hesitated. Should he back up Saul’s idea? Or stand pat?
Dyson shook his head. “I spoke last week about a dream. It is good to dream—but be sure to wake up.”
A wave of laughter came down from the crowd and broke over Gordon. He stepped backward two paces without thinking. Dyson himself looked surprised at the reaction, and then smiled down from his position halfway up the bowl-shaped auditorium, his face softening as he looked at Gordon, as though to blunt the edge of his remark. Around Dyson others were slapping their knees and rocking back and forth in their seats, as though something had unleashed a tension in them and now, with a sign from Dyson, they were sure of how to react.
“I don’t propose…” Gordon began, but was drowned out by the continuing laughter. “I don’t…” He noticed Isaac Lakin standing, a few seats from the front and to the left. Eyes in the audience turned from Gordon to Lakin. The laughter died.
“I would like to make a statement,” Lakin said, voice booming. “I invented the idea of spontaneous resonance to explain unusual data. I did so completely honestly. I think there is something happening in these experiments. But this message thing—” he waved a hand in dismissal. “No. No. It is nonsense. I now disclaim any association with it. I do not want my name linked with such, such claims. Let Bernstein and Shriffer make what they want—I do not cooperate.”
Lakin sat down decisively. There was applause.
“I don’t propose to decide what this means,” Gordon began. His voice was thin and it was hard getting the words out. He peered at Dyson. Someone was whispering to Dyson and smiling broadly. Lakin, Gordon noticed, was sitting with arms folded across his chest, glaring down at the RA and DEC. Gordon spun and looked at the coordinates looming above him, large and flat and remorseless.
“But I think it’s there.” He turned back to the crowd. “I know it sounds funny, but…” The buzzing in the audience kept on. He coughed, and could not seem to summon up the booming confidence that Lakin had used. The crowd noise got louder.
“Ah, Gordon…” He was surprised to find the Department Chairman at his elbow. Professor Glyer held up a palm toward the audience and the murmuring died. “We have already run over our allotted time, and another lecture is scheduled to begin here. Further, ah, further questions can be asked at the coffee to follow, served upstairs in the foyer.” The chairman led a muted ritual applause. It was all but drowned out in a babble of voices as the crowd spilled out of the room. Someone passed near Gordon, saying to his companion, “Well, maybe Cronkite believes it, but…” and the companion laughed. Gordon stood with his back to the blackboard, watching them leave. Nobody came up to ask a question. Around Lakin a knot of people buzzed. Dyson appeared at Gordon’s side. “Sorry they took it that way,” he said. “I didn’t mean it as…”
“I know,” Gordon murmured. “I know.”
“It simply seems so damned unlikely…”
“Shriffer thinks…” Gordon began, but decided to let the subject alone. “What did you think of the rest of the message?”
“Well, frankly, I don’t believe there is a message. It makes no sense.”
Gordon nodded.
“Uh, the press coverage hasn’t helped you any, you realize.”
Gordon nodded.
“Well, uh, some coffee then?” Dyson bowed goodbye uneasily and moved away with the exiting crowd. The Colloquium had trickled away to the coffee and cookies upstairs and Gordon felt the tension drain out of him, to be replaced by the familiar day-end numbness. As he collected his viewgraphs his hands shook. I should get more exercise, he thought. I’m out of shape. Abruptly he decided to skip the coffee hour. The hell with them. The hell with the whole damned bunch.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE MAITRE D’HOTEL AT THE TOP OF THE COVE RESTAURANT said, “Dinner, sir, s’il vous plaît?”