Timescape

by Gregory Benford

  • • •

  The crowd of fathers had a holiday air, chattering and laughing. A few kicked a soccer ball on the gray cobblestones. This was a lark, an event to raise money for the hobbling city government of Cambridge. An official had read about such a search in American cities, and last month London had staged one.

  Into the sewers they descended, bright electric torches spiking through the murk. Beneath the scientific laboratories and industrial sites of town the stonework passages were large enough for a man to walk upright. Renfrew tugged the airmask tight against his face, smiling at Johnny through the transparent molded cup. Spring rains had swept clean; there was little stench. Their fellow hunters spilled past, buzzing with excitement.

  Mercury was now exceedingly rare, commanding a thousand New Pounds per kilogram. In the gaudy mid-century times, commercial grade mercury had been poured down sinks and drains. It was cheaper then to throw out dirtied mercury and buy a fresh supply. The heaviest metal, it sought the lowest spots in the sewer system and pooled there. Even a liter recovered would justify the trouble.

  They soon worked their way into the more narrow pipes, slipping away from the crowd. Their torches cast sparkling reflections from the wrinkled skin of the water caught in pools. “Hey, this way, Dad,” Johnny called. The acoustics of the tunnels gave each word a hollow center. Renfrew turned and abruptly slipped. He spilled into the scum of a standing pond, cursing. Johnny bent down. The torch’s cone caught a seam of tarnished quicksilver. Renfrew’s boot had snagged at a crack where two pipes butted unevenly. Mercury glowed as if alive beneath the filmed water. It gave off a warm, smudged glitter, a thin trapped snake worth a hundred guineas.

  “A find! A find!” Johnny chanted. They sucked the metal into pressure bottles. Finding the luminous metal lifted their spirits; Renfrew laughed with gusty good humor. They walked on, discovering unexplored caves and dark secrets in the warrens, fanning the curving walls with yellow beams. Johnny discovered a high niche, scooped out and furnished with a moldy mattress. “Home of some layabout, I expect,” Renfrew murmured. They found candle stubs and frayed paperbacks. “Hey, this one’s from 1968, Dad,” Johnny said. It looked pornographic to Renfrew; he tossed it face down on the mattress. “Should be getting back,” he said.

  They found an iron ladder, using the map provided. Johnny wriggled out, blinking in the late afternoon sunlight. They queued up to turn in their pint of the silvery stuff to the Hunt Facilitator. In line with current theory, Renfrew noted, social groupings were now facilitated, not led. Renfrew stood and watched Johnny talk and scuffle and go through the tentative approaching rituals with two other boys nearby in line. Already Johnny was getting beyond the age when parents deeply influenced him. From now on it was peer pressure and the universals: swacking the ball about in the approved manner; showing proper disdain for girls; establishing one’s buffer state role between the natural bullies and the naturally bullied; faking a certain coarse but necessarily vague familiarity with sex and the workings of those mysterious gummy organs, seldom seen but deeply sensed. Soon he would face the consuming problem of adolescence—how to have it off with some girl and thus pass through the flame into manhood, and yet avoid the traps that society laid in the way. Or perhaps this rather cynical view was outdated now. Maybe the wave of sexual freedom that had washed over earlier generations had made things easier. Somehow, though, Renfrew suspected otherwise. What was worse, he could think of nothing very straightforward he himself could hope to do about the matter. Perhaps relying on the intuition of the boy himself was the best path. So what guidance could he give Johnny? “See here, son, remember one thing—don’t take any advice.” He could see Johnny’s eyes widen and the boy reply, “But that’s silly, Daddy. If I take your advice, I’m doing the opposite of what you say.” Renfrew smiled. Paradoxes sprouted everywhere.

  A small student band made a great noisy thing of the announced total, several kilograms in all. Boys cheered. A man nearby muttered, “Livin’ off a yes’day,” and Renfrew said drily, “Trapping right.” There was a feeling here of salvaging the lore and ore of the past, not making anything new. Like the country itself, he thought.

  Bicycling home, Johnny wanted to stop and see the Bluebell Country Club, an unbearably cute name for an eighteenth-century stone cottage near the Cam. In it a Miss Bell kept a cat hotel, for owners who were away. Once Marjorie had adopted a disagreeable cat which Renfrew had finally lodged there permanently, not having the heart to simply throw the bugger in the Cam. Miss Bell’s rooms stank of cat piss and perpetual tubercular-class dampness. “No time,” Renfrew shouted to Johnny’s question and they pedaled on past the cat citadel. Afterward, Johnny was a bit slower than before, his face blank. Renfrew was at once sorry he had been gruff. He was having such moments more often lately, he realized. Perhaps in part his absence from home, working at the lab, made him acutely sensitive to lapsed closeness with Marjorie and the kids. Or perhaps there was a time in life when you realized dimly that you had become rather like your own parents, and that your reactions were not wholly original. The genes and environment had their own momentum.

  Renfrew caught sight of an odd yellow cloud squatting on the horizon and remembered the summer afternoons he and Johnny had spent watching the cloud sculptors work above London. “Look there!” he called, pointing. Johnny dutifully gave the yellow cloud a glance. “Angels getting ready to piss,” Renfrew explained, “as m’old man used to say.” Bucked up by this bit of family history, they both smiled.

  They stopped at a bakery in King’s Parade, Fitzbillies. Johnny became a starving English schoolboy bravely carrying on. Renfrew allowed as how he could have two, no more. The news-agent’s a door down proclaimed on a chalkboard the dreadful news that The Times Literary Supplement had gone belly-up, an incoming datum which Renfrew found only slightly less interesting than the banana production of Borneo. The headlines gave no clue as to whether financial strains had caused the foldup, or—what seemed more likely to Renfrew by a long measure—whether it was the dearth of worthwhile books.

  • • •

  Johnny banged into the house, provoking an answering cry from his sister. Renfrew followed, feeling a bit clapped out from the cycling, and strangely depressed. He sat in his living room for a moment trying for once to think of nothing whatever, and failing. Half the room seemed totally unfamiliar to him. Antique glass paperweight, suspiciously tarnished candlestick, frilly lampshade with flower on it, Gauguin reprint, whimsical striped china pig on the hearth, brass rubbing of a medieval lady, beige china cat ashtray with poetic quotation written in flowing script round the rim. Hardly a square centimeter hadn’t been made sodding nice. About the time these registered, the persistent small tinny voice of Marjorie’s marauding radio got through to him, on again about the Nicaragua thing. The Americans were again trying to get approval from the motley crew of neighboring governments for a sea-level canal. To compete with the Panamanian one would seem dead easy, considering it was jammed up half the year. Renfrew remembered a BBC interview on just this subject, in which the sod from Argentina or somewhere had gone on at the American ambassador about why the Americans were called the Americans and those south of the USA not. The logic gradually unfurled to include the assumption that since the USAians had appropriated the American name, they would thus appropriate any new canal The ambassador, not wise to the ways of the telly, had replied with a rational explanation. He noted that no South American nation included the word “America” in its name, and thus had no strong claim to it. The triviality of this point in the face of an avalanche of psychic energy from the Argentinian had put the ambassador far down in total points by the time the viewers phoned in their opinions of the discussion. Why, the ambassador fellow had scarcely smiled or mugged at the camera, or smacked a fist onto the table before him. How could he expect to have any media impact whatever?

  He went in to find Marjorie rearranging the preserve jars for what appeared to be a third time. “Somehow, you know, i
t doesn’t look square,” she said to him with a distracted irritation. He sat at the kitchen table and poured himself some coffee, which, as expected, tasted rather like dog’s fur. It always did lately. “I’m sure it’s true,” he murmured. But then he studied her bustling form as she hoisted the cylinders of pale amber, and indeed, the shelves did seem at a tilt. He had made them on a precise radial line extending dead to the center of the planet, geometrically impeccable and absolutely rational and quite beside the point. Their home was warped and swayed by the times it had passed through. Science came to nought in these days. This kitchen was the true local reference frame, the Galilean invariant. Yes. Watching his wife turn and mix the jars, Prussian rigidities standing on slabs of pine, he saw that it was the shelves which stood aslant now; the walls were right.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PETERSON AWOKE AND LOOKED OUT OF THE WINDOW. The pilot had looped around to come in to San Diego from the ocean side. From this height most of the coastline north to Los Angeles was visible. That city was cloaked in its permanent haze; otherwise the day was clear and bright. The sun sparked flashes of brilliance from the windows of high-rise office blocks. Peterson stared vacantly at the sea. Tiny puckered lines of waves crawled imperceptibly toward the shore. Here and there, as the plane swung lower, he could see curves of white froth against the blue, vastly different from the ocean he had flown over the day before.

  He had taken a commercial flight. From the air, the diatom bloom on the Atlantic had been horribly visible. It now extended over a hundred-kilometer diameter. Bloom was a good word for it, he thought wryly. It had looked like some giant flower, a scarlet camellia blossoming far off the shores of Brazil. His fellow passengers had been excited by the vision, stampeding from window to window to get a better view, asking agitated questions. Interesting, he observed, how red, the color of blood, spelled danger to the human mind. It had been eerie to look down and see that still, wounded ocean, the fringe of pink surf.

  His mind had distanced itself from the reality below, turning it into a surrealistic work of art. Add purple jaguars and yellow trees: a Jesse Allen. And orange fishes in the air above…

  How did that Bottomley poem go? The second stanza—something about forcing the birds to wing too high—where your unnatural vapors creep; Surely the living rocks shall die when birds no rightful distance keep. Nineteenth-century doggerel. How one clutched at the shreds of civilization.

  There had been rioting in Rio. Standard political stuff, pop Marxism and local gripes touched off by the bloom. A waiting helicopter had whisked him from the airport to a secret rendezvous on a large yacht, anchored offshore north of the city. The Brazilian President was there, with his Cabinet. McKerrow from Washington, and Jean-Claude Rollet, a colleague of Peterson’s on the Council. They had conferred from 10 a.m. until late afternoon, having lunch brought in to them. Measures would be taken to contain the bloom, if possible. The crucial thing was to reverse the process; experiments were being conducted in the Indian Ocean and in control tanks in Southern California. Some emergency supplies were voted to Brazil, to compensate for the disruption in fishing. The Brazilian President was to play down the significance of this, avoid wholesale panic. Fingers-in-the-dike, fragile buttresses against the weight of the sickened sea around them, and so on. When they disbanded, Rollet had gone to report directly to the Council.

  Peterson had had to step lively to avoid getting loaded up with errand-running, interference-blocking, and other jobs. Lubricating a crisis like this one took a lot of skillful footwork. There were the individual nations to soothe, England’s own interests to look out for (though that was not his prime official task), and of course the ever-present snout of the media pig. Peterson had argued successfully that someone needed to give an official beady eye to the California experiments. One had not only to do the right thing, one must above all be seen doing it. This got him the time he needed. His true purpose was a little experiment he’d thought of himself.

  • • •

  Straightaway after touchdown canned music came on and chaps began hauling out their carry-ons for the rush. Peterson found this the worst part of commercial travel and wished again he had pressed Sir Martin for authority to have his own executive jet on this trip. They were expensive, wasteful, etc. etc., but a bloody sight better than going in a cattle-car with wings. The standard argument, that private transport let one rest and thus saved the valuable executive’s energies, hadn’t held up well in the era of dwindling budgets.

  He left the plane before anyone else, through the forward door, as per plan. There was a gratifyingly large security guard, decked out in leather boots and helmet. By now he was used to the openly worn automatic pistols.

  His limo contained a protocol officer who babbled on to no consequence, but Peterson turned him off early on and enjoyed the ride. The security car behind stayed quite close, he noted. There seemed no sign of the recent “unpleasantness.” A few burned-out blocks of buildings, to be sure, and a freeway underpass on Route 405 pocked by heavy-caliber fire, but no air of lingering tension. The streets were fairly clear and the freeway was virtually deserted. Since the Mexican fields had petered out far ahead of notoriously optimistic schedules, California had ceased to be an automobile-worshiping paradise. That, plus the political pressure from the Mexicans to make good the highflown promises of economic uplift, had mixed in with the rest of the political brew here and led to the “unrest.”

  • • •

  The usual ceremonies sopped up minimal time. The Scripps Institute of Oceanography had a weathered but solid look to it, blue tiles and salty smell and all that. The staff were by now used to dignitaries trotting through. The TV johnnies got their footage—only it wasn’t called that anymore, Peterson, reminded himself, the mysterious term “dexers” having materialized in its place—and were duly ushered away. Peterson smiled, shook hands, made bland small talk. The package Markham had asked for from Caltech appeared and Peterson tucked it into his carrying case. Markham had requested this material, said it related to the tachyon business, and Peterson had agreed to use his good offices to extract it from the Americans. The work wasn’t publishable yet, a familiar ruse to avoid giving away anything, but a bit of footwork had got round that one.

  The morning went by as planned. A general survey by an oceanographer, slides and viewgraphs before an audience of twenty. Then a reprise, more frank and far more pessimistic, with an audience of five. Then Alex Kiefer, head of the thing, in private.

  “Don’t you want to take your coat off? It’s pretty warm today. Great day, in fact.” Kiefer spoke fast, almost nervously, and blinked as he spoke. Free of the mob now, Kiefer seemed to have an excess of energy. He walked quickly, bouncing forward on his toes, and looked around him constantly, jerkily saluting the few people they passed. He ushered Peterson into his office.

  “Come in, come in,” he said, rubbing his hands. “Take a seat. Let me take your jacket. No? Yes, beautiful view, isn’t it? Beautiful.”

  This latter was in response to a comment Peterson had not in fact made, although he had automatically crossed to the large corner windows, drawn by the shimmering expanse of the Pacific below. “Yes,” he said now, making the expected remark. “It’s a magnificent view. Doesn’t it distract you?”

  The wide sandy beach stretched toward La Jolla and then curved out, broken up by rocks and coves, to a promontory surrounded by paradise palms. Out on the ocean, lines of surfers in wet suits sat bobbing patiently on their boards like large black sea birds.

  Kiefer laughed. “If I find I can’t concentrate, I just put on a wet suit and go out and swim. Clears the mind. I try to swim every day. Matter of fact, hardly need a wet suit these days. Water’s already pretty warm. Those youngsters out there think it’s cold.” He indicated the surfers, most of whom were now on their knees, paddling before a good-sized wave. “In the old days it used to get real cold. Before they put those multi-gigawatt nuclear plants at San Onofre, y’know. Well, I’m sure you k
now. That kind of thing is your business, isn’t it? Anyway, it’s raised the water temperature slightly, just along this section of the coast. Interesting. So far it seems to have stimulated aquatic life. We’re watching it carefully here, of course. In fact, it’s one of our chief studies. If it gets higher, it could alter some cycles, but as far as we know, it’s peaked. There’s been no increase for several years now.”

  Kiefer’s movements and speech became less jerky as he began to talk about his work. Peterson guessed him to be in his late forties. There were lines about his eyes and his wiry black hair was gray at the sides but he looked fit and lean. He had the look of an ascetic, but his office belied it. Peterson had already noted, with that mixture of envy and contempt he often felt in America, Kiefer’s perks: deep pile of the fitted olive-green carpet, sleek expanse of rosewood desk top, moist hanging ferns and spider plants, Japanese prints on the walls, glossy magazines on the tile-topped coffee table, and of course the vast tinted windows with their Pacific view. He had a momentary vision or Renfrew’s cluttered cubbyhole in Cambridge. Apart from the view, however, Kiefer showed no pride in or even awareness of his surroundings. They sat down, not at his desk, but in comfortable chairs by the coffee table. Peterson calculated that quite enough had been done along the lines of intimidate-the-visitor and decided a gesture of indifference was needed.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked, producing a cigar and gold lighter.

  “Oh… I… well, sure.” Kiefer appeared momentarily flustered. “Yes, yes, of course.” He got up and slid the large window partly open, then crossed to his desk and spoke into the intercom. “Carrie? Would you bring in an ashtray, please?”