Except his mother. She ran out of neighborhood news soon enough and then relied on his friends or his sister to carry the conversation. Alone with him, she said little. He found himself slowly drawn into this vacuum. The apartment had been thick with talk as he grew up, except in the last times of his father, and a silence here unnerved him. Gordon told his mother about the battle over his work. Of Saul Shriffer. (No, she had not seen the TV news, but she heard. She wrote him, remember?) Of spontaneous resonance. Of Tulare’s warning. And finally, of Penny. His mother didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t believe a girl would turn down a man like her son. What could she be thinking of, to do that? Gordon found this response unexpectedly pleasing; he had forgotten the ability of mothers to shore up sons’ egos. He confessed to her that somehow he had gotten into the habit of thinking he and Penny would settle into something more conventional (“respectable,” his mother corrected). It had come as a surprise that Penny wasn’t thinking in parallel. Something had happened to him then. He tried to explain it to his mother. She made the familiar, encouraging sounds. “Maybe, I don’t know, it was… Penny I wanted to hold on to, now that everything else is going kaput…” But that wasn’t quite what he meant, either. He knew the words were false as soon as they were out. His mother picked up on them, though. “So she doesn’t know what’s what, this is a surprise? I tried to tell you that.” Gordon shook his head, sipping tea, confused. It was no use, he saw. He was all jumbled up inside and he suddenly didn’t want to talk about Penny any more. He started on the physics again and his mother clattered the spoons and teapot with fresh energy, smiling, “Good work, yes, that’s good for you now. Show her what she’s lost by—” and on she went, longer than Gordon wanted. He felt a momentum building in him, an urgency. He veered from these muddy matters of women. As his mother’s voice droned in the heavy air he thought about Claudia Zinnes. He shuffled numbers and equipment in his head. He was making some plans when her phrases gradually penetrated; she thought he was leaving Penny. “Huh?” he sputtered, and she said blankly, “Well, after that girl rejected you—” An argument followed. It reminded him far too much of the debates over when he had to be home from dates, and what he wore, and all the other small things that finally drove him to an apartment of his own. It ended with the same sad shaking of the head, the “You are fartootst, Gordon, fartootst…” He changed the subject, wanted to call up Uncle Herb. “He is in Massachusetts. He bought a consignment of hats cheap, now goes up there to spread them around. The market fell kapoosh when Kennedy wouldn’t wear one, you know, but your uncle figures in New England the men, their heads are cold.” She made more tea, they went for a walk. The silences widened between them. Gordon made no attempt to bridge them. His mother was aboil over Penny, he could see that, but he’d had enough. He could stay longer, but the spreading silences promised more trouble. He stayed overnight, took her to an off-Broadway play and topped it off with crepes at Henry VIII’s. The next morning he caught the 8:28 United for the coast.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
COOPER LOOKED DOUBTFUL. “YOU THINK THIS IS enough?”
“For now, yeah. Who knows?”—Gordon shrugged—“Maybe for good, too.”
“I at least ought to fill in some of the high field observations.”
“Not that important.”
“After what that committee did to me, I want to be sure—”
“More data isn’t the answer. You need more background reading, more analysis of your data, things like that. Not more numbers churning out of the lab.”
“You sure?”
“You can close out your run by tomorrow.”
“Umm. Well, okay.”
In reality, Cooper probably could strengthen his case with more data. Gordon had always disliked the practice of overmeasuring every effect, though, mostly because he suspected it deadened the imagination. After a while you saw only what you expected to see. How could he be sure Cooper was really taking all the data as it came?
This was a justifiable reason for bumping Cooper off the NMR rig, but that wasn’t why Gordon did it. Claudia Zinnes would be starting up in September. If she found anything anomalous, Gordon wanted to be running simultaneously.
Gordon came home from the lab hungry. Penny had already eaten and was watching the 11 o’clock news. “Want anything?” he called from the kitchen.
“No.”
“What’s that you’re watching?”
“March on Washington.”
“Uh?”
“Martin Luther King. You know.”
He hadn’t been paying any attention to the news. He asked nothing more; discussing politics with Penny would only set her off. She had been elaborately casual since he had returned. There was an odd truce between them, not a peace.
“Hey,” he called, coming into the living room, which was lit only by the pale electric glow of the TV. “Dishwasher won’t go on.”
“Uh huh.” She didn’t turn her head.
“Did you call?”
“No. You, for once.”
“I did last.”
“Well, I’m not. Hate that. Let it be broke.”
“You spend more time with it than me.”
“That’ll change, too.”
“What?”
“Not busting ass to fix meals any more.”
“Didn’t think you had.”
“How’d you know. You couldn’t fry butter.”
“Two points off for credibility,” he said lightly. “You know I can cook some things, anyway.”
“Come on.”
“I’m serious,” he said sharply. “I’m going to be in the lab a lot and—”
“Loud and prolonged applause.”
“For Chrissake.”
“I won’t be here much, so.”
“Neither will I except in and out.”
“Least you’re doing something now.”
“Crap, that’s not what you’re on the rag about.”
“Metaphorical rag?”
“Real rag, metawhatever rag—how do I know?”
“I thought you thought maybe real rag. Otherwise maybe you would’ve touched me since you got back.”
“Oh.”
“Didn’t notice, huh?”
Grimly: “I noticed.”
“Okay, why?”
“Wasn’t thinking about it, I guess.”
“Think about it.”
“You know, busy.”
“Think I don’t know? Come on, Gordon. I saw your face when you got off that plane. We were going to have a drink at the El Cortez, look at the city. Lunch.”
“Okay. Look, I need dinner.”
“You dinner, I’ll watch the speech.”
“Good. Wine?”
“Sure. Enough for later?”
“Later?”
“My mother should’ve taught me to be more direct. Later, when we fuck.”
“Oh, yes. Fuck we will.”
They did. It wasn’t very good.
Gordon broke Cooper’s experiment down to the basic components. Then he rebuilt it. He checked each piece for shielding, looking for any way an unsuspected signal could get into the circuitry. He had most of it reassembled when Saul Shriffer appeared, unannounced, in the lab.
“Gordon! I was just at UCLA and thought I’d drop by.”
“Oh, hi,” Gordon murmured, wiping his hands on an oily cloth. A man with a camera followed Saul into the lab.
“This is Alex Paturski, from Life. They’re doing a piece on exobiology.”