He squinted to see past the battery of lights. A curving crowd of faces swam in the half-space beyond the stage. They rustled with anticipation—not for him, he knew—and to the left a TV camera peered in cyclopean stupor at the vacant dais. A sound engineer tested the mikes.
Gordon searched the faces he could see. Was Markham out there? He trolled for the right combination of features. It had struck him how alike most people were, despite their vaunted individuality, and yet how quickly the eye could cut through the similarities to pick out the small details that separated known from stranger. Someone caught his eye. He peered through the glare. No, it was Shriffer. Gordon wondered with amusement what Saul would think if he knew Markham was probably only meters away, an unknowing link to the lost world of the messages. Gordon would never reveal those distant names now. It would get into the press and confuse everything, prove nothing.
It was not only keeping the identities secret that made him slow to publish his full data. Most of what he had thought was noise in his earlier experiments was actually indecipherable signals. Those messages fled backward in time from some unfathomable future. They were scarcely absorbed at all by the present rather low-density distribution of matter in the universe. But as they ran backward, what was to men an expanding universe appeared to the tachyons as a contracting one. Galaxies drew together, packing into an ever-shrinking volume. This thicker matter absorbed tachyons better. As they flowed back into what was, to them, an imploding universe, increasing numbers of the tachyons were absorbed. Finally, at the last instant before it compressed to a point, the universe absorbed all tachyons from each point in its own future. Gordon’s measurement of the tachyon flux, integrated back in time, showed that the energy absorbed from the tachyons was enough to heat the compressed mass. This energy fueled the universal expansion. So to the eyes of men, the universe exploded from a single point because of what would happen, not what had. Origin and destiny intertwined. The snake ate its tail.
Gordon wanted to be absolutely sure before he reported on the flux and his conclusions. He was sure it would not be well received.
The world did not want paradox. The reminder that time’s vast movements were loops we could not perceive—the mind veered from that. At least part of the scientific opposition to the messages was based on precisely that flat fact, he was sure. Animals had evolved in such a way that the ways of nature seemed simple to them; that was a definite survival trait. The laws had shaped man, not the other way around. The cortex did not like a universe that fundamentally ran both forward and back.
So he would not smudge the issue with a few tattered names, not for Shriffer’s spotlight. Perhaps he would tell Markham, just as he would inevitably publish the faint calls he had measured from Epsilon Eridani, eleven light years away. They were voices from an undated future, reporting shipboard maintenance details. No paradoxes there. Unless, of course, the information blunted the leap into rocketry now underway, aborted the upcoming space station by some contrary twist. That was always possible, he supposed. Then the universe would split again. The river would fork. But perhaps, when this was all understood and Tanninger’s squiggles cut deeper into the riddle, they would know whether paradoxes should be avoided at all. Paradoxes did no true damage, after all. It was like having a dusky twin beyond the looking glass, identical but for his lefthandedness. And the nature of the tachyons made accidental paradox unlikely, anyway. A starship reporting back to its Earth would use tight beams. No fringing fields would by chance catch the present Earth on its helical whirl through space, intersect its gavotte around the galaxy.
Ramsey moved across his field of vision and jerked him back into this illuminated moment. Ramsey stubbed out his smoke, the slim cigar twisting like a dying insect. The man was nervous. Suddenly, a blare of recorded music. Hail to the Chief. Everyone on the stage stood, belying the fact that the man who entered from the right, smiling and waving a casual hand, was a public servant. President Scranton shook the Secretary’s hand with media-sharpened warmth and took in the rest of the stage with a generalized smile. Despite himself, Gordon felt a certain zest. The President moved with a comfortable certainty, acknowledging the cheers and finally sitting beside the Secretary. Scranton had discredited Robert Kennedy, tripping the scowling younger brother in a tangle of Democratic wiretapping, and then the use of the intelligence community and the FBI against the Republicans. Gordon had found the charges difficult to believe at the time, particularly since Goldwater had uncovered the first hints. But in retrospect it was good to be rid of the Kennedy dynasty idea, and the Imperial Presidency along with it.
The Secretary was at the dais now, making the mechanical introductions and slipping in the obligatory puffing-up of the administration. Gordon leaned over to Marsha and whispered, “Christ, I didn’t make up a speech.”
She said merrily, “Tell them about the future, Gordelah.”
He growled, “That future’s only a dream now.”
She replied laconically, “It’s a poor sort of memory that works only backward.”
Gordon grinned back at her. She had fetched that up from her reading to the kids, a line from the lookingglass, time-reversed scene, the White Queen. Gordon shook his head and sat back.
The Secretary had finished his prepared speech and now introduced the President to a solid round of applause. Scranton read the citation for Ramsey and Hussinger. The two men came forward, awkwardly managing to get in each other’s way. The President handed over the two plaques amid applause. Ramsey glanced at his and then exchanged it with Hussinger’s, to laughter from the audience. Polite hand clapping as they sat down. The Secretary came forward, shuffling papers, and handed some to the President. The next award was for some achievement in genetics which Gordon had never heard about. The recipient was a chunky Germanic woman who spread some pages before her on the dais and turned to the audience, plainly prepared for an extended history of her work. Scranton gave the Secretary a sidelong look and then moved back and sat down. He had been through such things before.
Gordon tried to concentrate on what she said, but lost interest when she launched into a salute to other workers in the field who regrettably could not be honored here today in such august surroundings.
He toyed with the question of what to say. He would never see the President again, never again even have the ear of so influential a person as the Secretary. Perhaps if he tried to convey something of what this all meant… His eyes strayed over the audience.
He had a sudden sense that time was here, not a relation between events, but a thing. What a specifically human comfort it was to see time as immutable, a weight you could not escape. Believing that, a man could give up swimming against this riverrun of seconds and simply drift, cease battering himself on time’s flat face like an insect flapping against a blossom of light. If only—
He looked at Ramsey, reading his plaque, oblivious to the geneticist’s ramble, and remembered the foaming waves at La Jolla, cupping forward out of Asia to break on the bare new land. Gordon shook his head, not knowing why, and reached for Marsha’s hand. A warming press.
He thought of the names ahead, in that deflected future, who had tried to send a signal into the receding murk of history, and write it fresh again. It took courage to send firefly hopes through the dark, phosphorescent dartings across an infinite swallowing velvet. They would need courage; the calamity they spoke of could engulf the world.