those messages we can’t decode weren’t from a human transmitter, far up in the future …”
Gordon grinned. Saul was one of the biggest names in science now, at least in the public eye. His popularizations made the bestseller lists, his television series ran in prime time. Gordon finished for him, “You mean, we’d have proof of an alien technology.”
“Sure. Worth trying, isn’t it?”
“Maybe so.”
The big bronze doors at the end of the foyer swung back. The crowd shuffled toward the reception room beyond. Gordon had noted that people in groups move as though by a slow diffusion process, and this mob was no different. Many he knew—Chet Manahan, a methodical solid state physicist who always wore a vest with matching tie, spoke five languages, and made sure you knew this within a few minutes of meeting him; Sidney Roman, a swarthy, delicate, thin man whose precise equations led to outrageous conclusions, some of which had proved right; Louisa Schwartz, who, contrary to her name, had luminous white skin and a mind that catalogued everything in astrophysics, including most of the unprintable gossip; George Maklin, red-faced and loud, shoulders rippling with muscle, who carried out experiments suspended by whiskers into liquid helium, measuring wisps of momentum; Douglas Karp, a czar of a rabble of graduate students which cranked out two papers a month on the band structure of assorted solids, enabling him to lecture in sunny summer schools in the Mediterranean; Brian Nantes, with enormous, booming energy which in his papers squeezed into adroit, laconic equations, denuded of commentary or argument with his contemporaries, with a decidedly pearls-before-swine abstract to accompany the text—and many more, some casually met at conferences, others opposed in heated sessions of APS meetings, most of them dim faces associated with the stutter of initials beneath interesting papers, or met at a sandwich-and-beer faculty lunch just before delivering a seminar, or seen receiving polite applause at a meeting after they had mumbled an invited paper into a microphone. In this pack Saul drifted away, halfway through describing a plan to ferret out extraterrestrials by the squiggles and beeps in the tachyon spectrum. Gordon could do the observations, see, and Saul would look at the data and see what they meant.
Gordon wormed away diagonally, letting a rapidly talking clump of particle physicists come between him and Saul. The buffet lunch lay dead ahead of him. Characteristically, the scientists wasted no time politely hanging back from the self-serve table. Gordon piled beef on bread and escaped with a presentable sandwich. He bit in. The sting of the horseradish cleared his sinuses, watering his eyes. The punch was a superior grade of champagne diluted with pungent orange juice.
Shriffer was surrounded now by a crescent of approving faces. It was odd, how celebrity invaded science these days, so that appearing on the Johnny Carson show was more effective with the NSF than publishing a brilliant series of papers in Physical Review.
Yet in the end it was media fixation that had done it all, Gordon reflected. At the conclusion of the press conference of Ramsey and Hussinger, Gordon had felt the constricting heat flow through him and seem to wash through the air. Then, watching Cronkite talk grimly into the camera on November 22, he had felt it again. Was that the signature of a true, unavoidable paradox? Was that when the future had radically altered? There was no way to tell, at least not yet. He had pored over records of atmospheric phenomena, of cosmic ray counts, of radio noise and starlight fluence—and found nothing. There were no instruments yet designed which could measure the effect. Gordon felt, though, that he had a subjective perception of when it had happened. Perhaps because he was close to the site where the paradoxes were driven home? Or because he was already strung out, as Penny would’ve put it, that is, fine-tuned? He might never know.
A passing face nodded. “Quite a day,” Isaac Lakin said formally, and moved on. Gordon nodded. The remark was suitably ambiguous. Lakin had become a director at the NSF, shepherding the magnetic resonance work. Gordon’s controversial area, tachyon detection, was under another man. Lakin was now best known for his coauthorship of the “spontaneous resonance” paper in PRL. The refracted fame had lifted him, agreeably buoyant, into his present position.
The other coauthor, Cooper, had done reasonably well, too. His thesis went through the committee with slick speed, once stripped of the spontaneous resonance effects. He had gone off to