Scattered, polite applause. The President gave the hefty woman her plaque—the check would come later, Gordon knew—and she sat. Then Scranton peered into his bifocals and began to read, in the squarish vowels of Pennsylvania, the citation to Gordon Bernstein.
“—for investigations in nuclear magnetic resonance which produced a startling new effect—”
Gordon reflected that Einstein won the Nobel prize for the photoelectric effect, which was considered reasonably safe by 1921, and not for the still controversial theory of relativity. Good company to be in.
“—which, in a series of definitive experiments in 1963 and 1964 he showed could only be explained by the existence of a new kind of particle. This strange particle, the tac—tac—”
The President stumbled over the pronunciation. Agreeing laughter rippled through the audience. Something pricked in Gordon’s memory and he searched the dark bowl of faces. That laugh. Someone he knew?
“—tachyon, is capable of moving faster than the speed of light. This fact implies—”
The tight bun of hair, the lifted, almost jaunty chin. His mother was in the third row. She was wearing a dark coat and had come to see this day, see her son on the bright stage of history.
“—that the particles can themselves travel backward in time. The implications of this are of fundamental importance in many areas of modern science, from cosmology to—”
Gordon half rose, hands clenched. The proud energy in thè way she beamed, head turned to the flow of words—
“—the structure of the subnuclear particles. This is truly an immense—”
But in the tangled rush of the months following November of 1963 she had died in Bellevue, before he ever saw her again.
“—scale, echoing the increasing connection—”
The woman in the third row was probably an aging secretary, called forth to see the President Still, something in her alert gaze—The room wavered, light blurred into pools.
“—between the microscopic and the macroscopic, a theme—”
Moisture on his cheeks. Gordon peered through his fuzzed focus at the lanky outline of the President, seeing him as a darker blotch beneath the burning spotlights. Beyond him, no less real, were the names from Cambridge, each a figure, each knowing the others, but never wholly. The shadowy figures moved now beyond reach, bound for their own destinations just as he and Ramsey and Marsha and Lakin and Penny were. But they were all simply figures. A piercing light shone through them. They seemed frozen. It was the landscape itself which changed, Gordon saw at last, refracted by laws of its own. Time and space were themselves players, vast lands engulfing the figures, a weave of future and past. There was no riverrun of years. The abiding loops of causality ran both forward and back. The timescape rippled with waves, roiled and flexed, a great beast in the dark sea.
The President had finished. Gordon stood. He walked to the dais on wooden feet.
“The Enrico Fermi Prize for—”
He could not read the citation on it. The faces hung before him. Eyes. The glaring light—
He began to speak.
He saw the crowd and thought of the waves moving through them, breaking into white, swallowing foam. The small figures dimly sensed the eddies of the waves as paradox, as riddle, and heard the tick of time without knowing what they sensed, and clung to their linear illusions of past and future, of progression, of their opening births and yawning deaths to come. Words caught in his throat. He went on. And he thought of Markham and his mother and all these uncountable people, never loosening their grip on their hopes, and their strange human sense, their last illusion, that no matter how the days moved through them, there always remained the pulse of things coming, the sense that even now there was yet still time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GREGORY BENFORD is one of the most accomplished hard SF authors of our time. A professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, he uses the most recent authentic, thoroughly grounded science.
As a stylist he has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Australian Ditmar Award.
He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society. His research encompasses both theory and experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics.
He has written over a dozen novels, including Great Sky River, Tides of Light, Across the Sea of Suns, Heart of the Comet (with David Brin), In the Ocean of Night, Furious Gulf, and Sailing Bright Eternity and a collection of short stories, In Alien Flesh. Gregory Benford lives in Laguna Beach, California, with his wife and two children.