Part 2 (2/2)

”I say 'part' because I'm not sure the Americans will send everything you need. They say there are other uses they have in mind. Uses aside from this tachyon business, I mean.””Could I get a list of what they have?””I'm working on it. Listen, I must ring off. Wanted to let you know.””Right. Fine. And, and thanks!”The news changed the tenor of the party. Heather and James knew nothing of John's experiment, so there was much explaining to do before they could understand the import of the telephone call.Renfrew and Markham took turns explaining the basic idea, skipping over the complicated matter of Lorentz transformations and how tachyons could propagate backward in time; they would have needed a blackboard to make the attempt. Marjorie came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on an ap.r.o.n. The men's voices were authoritative, booming in the small dining room. Candlelight bathed the faces around the table in a pale yellow glow. The women spoke with rising inflections, questioning.

a o”It seems sange to think of the people in one's own past as real,” Marjorie said distantly. Heads turned towards her. ”That is, to imagine them as, as still alive and changeable in some sense ...”The company sat silent for a moment. Several frowned. Marjorie's way of putting the issue had caught them off balance. They had spoken often this evening of things changing in the future. To imagine the past as alive, too, as a moving and f. lexing thing--The moment pa.s.sed, and Marjorie returned to the kitchen. She came back with not one but three desserts. When she set them down, the piece de rsistance--a meringue confection With early rasp-berries and whipped cream--created the wave of ahs she had antic.i.p.ated. She followed this in short order with pots of strawberry mousse and a large gla.s.s bowl of carefully decorated sherry trifle.”Marjorie, you're too much,” James protested.

John sat and beamed silently as the guests heaped praises on his wife. Even Jan managed two helpings, though she refused the trifle.”I think,” Greg commented, ”that sweets must be the English subst.i.tute for s.e.x.”After dessert the party moved near the fireplace as Greg and John cleared away the dessert plates.

Marjorie felt a warm relaxation seeping through her as she brought in the tea things. The room had taken on a chill as darkness deepened; she added a small, glimmering candle heater to warm the cups. The fire crackled and shot an orange spark onto the worn carpet.”I know coffee is supposed to be bad for you but '

I must say it goes better with liqueurs,” Marjorie observed.

”Would anyone like some? We've got Drambuie, Cointreau, and Grand Marnier. Not homemade.”She 'felt a relaxed sense of accomplishment now that the meal was over. Her duties ended with handing out the cups. Outside, a wind was getting 5 o Gregory Ben fordup. The curtains were open and she could see the silhouetted pine branches tossing outside the windows.

The living room was an oasis of light and peace and stability.As if reading her thoughts, Jan quoted softly: ”Stands the church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?”They all exaggerated, Marjorie thought, especially'

the press. History was a series of crises, after all, and they'd all survived so far. John worried about it, she knew, but really, things hadn't changed all that much.

CHAPTER SIX.

SEPTEMBER 25, 1962.

GORDON BERNSTEIN PUT DOWN HIS PENCIL WITH DE-.liberate slowness. He held it between thumb and forefinger and watched the tip tremble in the air. It was an infallible test; as he brought the pencil lead near the formica table top, the jittering of his hand made a tick-tick-tick rhythm. No matter how strongly he willed the hand to be still the ticking continued.

As he listened it seemed to swell and become louder than the muted chugging of the roughing pumps around him.Abruptly Gordon smashed the pencil down, gouging a black hole in the table, snapping off the lead,splintering the wood and yellow paint.”Hey, ah--”Gordon's head jerked up. Albert Cooper was standing beside him. How long had he been there?”I, ah, checked with Doctor Grundkind,” Cooper said, looking away from the pencil. ”Their whole rig is off the air.”

5 2 ”You looked it over yourself?” Gordon's voice came out thin and wheezing, overcontrolled.”Yeah, well they're kinda gettin' tired of me coming around,” Cooper said sheepishly. ”This time theyunplugged all their stuff from the wall outlets, even.”

Gordon nodded silently.

”Well, I guess that's it.””What do you mean?” Gordon said evenly.”Look, we've been working on this for--what?-four days.””So?”''we're at a dead end.”''why?””Grundkind's low-temperature group was the last candidate on our list. We've got everybody in thebuilding shut down.””Right.””So this noise it can't be spillover from them.”

”Uh huh.””And we know it isn't leaking in from outside.”

”The chicken wire we wrapped around the apparatus proves that,” Gordon agreed, nodding at the metal cage now embracing the entire magnet a.s.sembly.

”It should s.h.i.+eld out stray signals.”''eah. So it has to be some screwup in our electronics.””Nope.””Why not?” Cooper demanded impatient13a ”h.e.l.l, maybe Hewlett-Packard is s.h.i.+ttin' us on the specs, how do we know?””We've checked the rig ourselves.””But that's got to be it.””No,” Gordon said with compressed energy. ”No, there's something else.” His hand shot out and seized a stack of x-y recorder plots. ”I've been taking these for two hours. Look.”Cooper paged through the red-gridded sheets.

''well, it looks a little less noisy. I mean, the noise has got some regular spikes in it.””I tuned it in. Improved the resolution.”

TIMESCAPE.

s 3”So? It's still noise,” Cooper said irritably.

”No, it isn't:”

”Huh? Of course it is.”

”Look at those spikes I brought up out of the hash.

Look at their s.p.a.cing.”

Cooper fanned the sheets out on the formica table top. After a moment he said, ”I'm just yeballing it, but ... well, looks like they come at only vo different intervals.”

Gordon nodded energetically. ”Correct. 'That's what I noticed. What we're seeing here is a lot of background noise--d.a.m.ned if I know where that's coming from--with some regular stuff on top.”

'q-tow'd you get these plots?”

”Used the lock-in correlator, to cull out the genuine noise. This structure, this s.p.a.cing--it's there, probably been there all the time.”

”We just never looked closely enough.”

'We 'knew' it was garbage, and why study garbage?

Stupid.” Gordon shook his head, smiling wryly at himself.

Cooper's forehead wrinkled as he stared off into s.p.a.ce. ”I don't get it. What've these pulses got to do with the nuclear resonance?”

”I don't know. Maybe nothing.”

”But, h.e.l.l, that's what this experiment is. I'm measuring the big nuclear resonance spike, when we flip the spins of the atomic nuclei. These pulses--”

”They're not resonances. Not as I understand a simple resonance, anyway. Something's tipping over those nuclear spins, all right, but ... wait a sec.”

Gordon stared down at the x-y graphs. His left hand twitched absently at a b.u.t.ton on his rumpled blue s.h.i.+rt. ”I don't think this is any sort of frequency-dependent effect.”

”But that's what we're plotting. The intensity of the signal received, versus the frequency we see it at.”

”Yes, but that a.s.sumes everything's steady.”

”Well, it is.”

”Who says? Suppose the noise comes in bursts?”

5 4 ”Why should it?””d.a.m.n it!” Gordon slammed a fist down, sending the snapped pencil skittering off the table. ”Try the idea on for size! Why is it every student wants things spelled out for him?””Well, okay.” Cooper earnestly knitted his forehead into a worried expression. Gordon could see the man was obviously too tired to do any real thinking.

For that matter, so was he. They'd been hammering away at this nightmare problem for days, sleeping a minimal amount and going out for meals in greasy fast-food franchises. h.e.l.l, he hadn't even got down to the beach to do any jogg'mg. And Penny--Christ, he'd hardly caught a glimpse of her. She'd said something abrupt and feisty to him last night, just before he fell asleep and it hadn't registered with him until he was getting dressed, alone, this morning.

So there was some patching-up to do there, when he got home. If he ever got home, he added, because he was d.a.m.ned if he'd give up on this puzzle until...”Hey, try this,” Cooper said, jarring Gordon out of his musing. ”Suppose we're seeing a time-varying input here, the way you said it was, you know, days agogwhen ,,e started searching for outside noise sources. Our transcribing pen is moving at a constant rate across the paper, right?” Gordon nodded. ”So these spikes here are s.p.a.ced about a centimeter apart, and then two s.p.a.ced half a centimeter. Then a one centimeter interval, three half-centimeters, andSO on.”Gordon suddenly saw what he was driving at, but he let Coop finish.”That's the way the signal came in, s.p.a.ced out in time. Not frequency, time.”Gordon nodded. It was obvious, now that he stared at the wiggles and peaks of the recording pens. ”Something coming in bursts, all across the frequency spectrum we're studying.” He pursed his $ $.

lips. ”Bursts with long intervals between them, then some with shorter intervals.””Right.” Cooper nodded enthusiastically. ”That's it.””Short oneS, long ones... Short, long, short, short.

Like ...””Like a G.o.dd.a.m.ned code,” Cooper finished.Cooper wiped at his mouth and stared at the x-y recordings.”Do you know Morse code?” Gordon asked him quietly. ”I don't.””Well, yeah. I did when I was a kid, anyway.”

”Let's lay out these sheets, in the order I took the data.” Gordon stood up with renewed energy. He picked the broken pencil off the floor and inserted it in a.pencil sharpener and started turning the handle.

It made a raw, grinding noise.

When Isaac Lakin came into the nuclear resonance laboratory anyone, even a casual visitor, could tell it was his. Of course, the National Science Foundation paid for essentially all of it, except the war surplus electronics gear acquired from the Navy, and the University of California owned the immense pancake magnets under a Grantor's a.s.signment, but in any useful sense of the tertn the laboratory belonged to Isaac Lakin. He had established his reputation at MIT in a decade of sound work, research occasionally flecked by the sparkle of real brilliance. From there he had gone to General Electric and Bell Labs, each step taking him higher. When the University of California began building a new campus around the Scripps Inst.i.tute of Oceanography, Lakin became one of their first ”finds.” He had the contacts in Was.h.i.+ngton and brought a big chunk of money with him, money that translated into gear and lab s.p.a.ce and slots for junior faculty. Gordon had been one of the first to fill those slots, but from the beginning he and Lakin had failed to hit it off. When Lakin came into 5 Gordon's lab he usually found something out of place, a snarl of wires that almost tripped him, a dewar poorly secured, something that soured his mood.Lakin nodded to Cooper and murmured a h.e.l.lo to Gordon, his eyes scanning the lab. Gordon quickly led Lakin through a summary of their process of elimination. Lakin nodded, smiling faintly, as Cooper then detailed the weeks he had spent checking and rechecking the rig. As Cooper went on Lakin drifted away, thumbing a k.n.o.b here, studying a circuit there.”These leads are reversed,” he declared, holding up wiring with alligator clips attached.”That unit we aren't using anyway,” Gordon replied mildly. Lakin studied Cooper's circuitry, made a remark about a.s.semblying it better, and moved on.

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