Free Timescape by Gregory Benford Page A

"Here. They're not televising it.
    Look, drive on into Pacific Beach. We'll eat out. I want to hear this."
    Penny nodded silently and Gordon felt an odd sensation of relief. Yeah, it was good to get away from your own problems and listen to two guys pound each other to a pulp. He had picked up the habit of following the fights from his dad around the age of ten. They would sit in the overstuffed chairs of the living room and listen to the excited voices coming from the big brown old-fashioned Motorola in the corner. His father's eyes jerked back and forth, blank, seeing the punches and feints described from a thousand miles away. Dad had been overweight even then and when he unconsciously threw an imaginary punch, jerking his right elbow forward, the fat flapped on his upper arm. Gordon could see the flesh move even through his father's white shirt, and watched to see if the ash on his cigar would jerk off and crumble into a gray stain on the carpet. It always did, at least once, and his mother would come in on the middle of the fight and cluck-cluck about it and go out to get the dust pan.
    Dad would wink at him when there was a good punch or somebody went down, and Gordon would grin. He remembered it now as always happening in the summer, so that a traffic hum drifted up from 12th Street and 2nd Avenue, and his father always had damp crescents under his armpits when the fight was over. They drank cokes afterward. It had been a good time.
    As they entered the Limehouse, Gordon pointed to a far table and said,
    "Say, there are the Carroways. What does that make our average?"
    "Seven out of twelve," Penny pronounced.
    The Carroways were prominent astronomers, an English couple recently recruited into the Physics Department faculty. They were working at the forefront of the field, struggling with the recent discovery of the quasi-stellar sources. Elizabeth was the observer of the pair, and spent a good deal of time nearby at Palomar, taking deep plates of the sky and searching for more reddened points of light. The red shifts indicated that the sources were very far away and thus incredibly luminous. Bernard, the theoretician, thought it pretty likely that they were not distant galaxies at all. He was working on a model which regarded the sources as expelled lumps from our own galaxy, all rushing away from us at very nearly the speed of light and thus red-shifted. Either way, neither had the time to cook, and they seemed to prefer the same restaurants Gordon and Penny frequented.
    Gordon had noticed the correlation and Penny was keeping track of the statistics.
    "The resonant effect seems to be holding up," Gordon said to Bernard as they walked by. Elizabeth laughed, and introduced them to the third member of their party, a compact man with a piercing way of looking straight at people as he talked. Bernard asked them to sit at their table and soon the conversation turned to astrophysics and the red shift controversy. Partway through it they ordered the most exotic items they could find on the menu. The Limehouse was a rather second-rate Chinese restaurant, but it was the only one in town and the scientists were all confirmed in the belief that even second-level Chinese was preferable to first-level American. Gordon was wondering idly if this was an outcome of the internationalism of science when he suddenly realized that he hadn't caught the other man's name correctly. It was John Boyle, the famous astrophysicist who had a long string of successes to his credit. It was surprises like this, meeting the very best of the scientific community, that made La Jolla what it was. He was very pleased when Penny made a few funny remarks and Boyle laughed, his eyes studying her. This was the kind of thing, meeting the great, that would impress his mother; for this reason he instantly decided not to tell her. Gordon listened to the ebb and flow of the conversation carefully, trying to detect what quality made these colleagues stand out from