Sixty hours later we were in Rawalpindi, and I was buying airline tickets for the long flight home.
New York again. I told the backers of the expedition the unpleasant truth: that we had taken nothing from the valley, and they had nothing to show for all their investment. They were perhaps a little upset by that, but they were far more upset when they heard what had happened to Will and Gerald, and read the medical prognoses. Either might recover, but no one could predict how or when. Henry Hoffman showed what a gentleman he was by arranging perpetual medical care at his expense for as long as the two might need it.
I went home. And it was then that I discovered I had lied—accidentally—to our financial backers. While we were still traveling I had looked at the video camera tapes made by Sebastian on the trip, including one taken in the valley itself. It showed the same bleak desert that I remembered so well, dry sand and barren rock.
In addition to the videotapes, Gerald Sebastian had also shot four or five rolls of film, but I had no way of developing those until we returned home and I could get to a photolab. The films, with whatever latent images might be on their exposed surfaces, did not seem to me a high-priority item. I left them in the bottom of my luggage. At last, four days after I returned to my apartment in Albuquerque, I went to my modest photolab and developed them.
Five rolls showed Hong Kong and Pakistan, and our entry to western China. The sixth was different. I stared at the pictures for half an hour. And then I went to the telephone and placed a call to Jackie Sands in Manhattan. We talked for four hours, and all the time I realized how much I had been missing her.
“I know,” she said at last. “We could talk forever, but I’m going to hang up now. Don’t do anything silly, Sam. I have to see you, and I have to see it. I’ll be on the next plane out.”
She had to see what I had hardly been able to describe: the sixth film. There were just three exposures on it. The first was of the green statue, with only its head showing above the sand. In the other two, the statue was uncovered to waist level. It filled most of the frame, with an expression on its face that I could only now read (If I were alive, you would tremble). But there was enough space at the edges for something else to show: not the dry gray of desert sands, but the cool green of water; and on the surface of that water, dwarfed by distance and slightly out of focus, a score of tiny white sails, delicate as butterfly wings. At the very edge of the frame was a hint of a broad embankment, curving out of sight.
Jackie’s plane would not arrive for another five hours, but I drove at once to the airport. I thought about her while I waited, and about one other thing. Gerald Sebastian had expected to find Atlantis. Jackie had sought aliens. Had they in one sense both been right?
There is nothing more alien to a modern American than yesterday’s empires, with their arbitrary imperial powers, their cruelty, and their casual control over life and death. Humans make progress culturally, as well as technologically. Progress in one field may be quite separate from advances in the other. Suppose, then, the advanced civilization of an Atlantis; it might have technology far beyond our own, but it would have the bloody ways of a younger race. What would you expect from its emperors?
In ancient Egypt, Cheops had his Great Pyramid; Emperor Qin had his terra cotta army of ten thousand at Xian. But their technology was simple, and their monuments limited to stone and clay. Imagine a great khan, king of Atlantis, with powerful technology wedded to absolute rule. How would he assure his own memory, down through the ages?
I can suggest one answer. Imagine a technology that can imprint a series of images; not just on film, or a length of tape, but on an entire land, with every molecule carrying part of the message. The countryside is saturated with signal. But like the picture on an undeveloped film, the imprint can he latent for years or thousands of years, surviving the change from fertile land to bleak desert, until the right external stimulus comes along; and then it bursts forth. Atlantis, or Xanadu, or whatever world is summoned, appears in its old glory. To some, that vision may be beautiful; to others, it is intolerable. The great khan, indifferent to suffering, laughs across the centuries and inflicts his legacy.
An idea, no more; but it fills my mind. And how can I ever test it? Only by going back to that lonely valley in the Takla Makan, providing again the stimulus of disturbance, and waiting for the result.
I would love to do it, whatever the risk. The opportunity exists. Jackie told me on the phone that Henry Hoffman, indulgent as ever, was not disappointed by the last expedition. He would be willing to finance another trip to the Takla Makan; and he will let me lead it.
An attractive offer, since to raise that much money myself would take years. To search for Xanadu. How can I say no? And yet it is not simple; for Jackie and I know the rules, even though we have never discussed them. We must begin right, or not at all. I am not Gerald Sebastian. If I let myself take Henry’s money, I cannot also take his wife.
I make the decision sound difficult, but it is actually very easy. I learned the answer in the Takla Makan, and it is the only answer: for access to its rarest treasures, life offers but a single opportunity.
Xanadu has waited for thousands of years; it must wait a few years longer.
afterword: the courts of xanadu
Most people whom I meet assume that I like to travel, just because I have seen a lot of the world. In fact, I hate it. Jet lag affects me more than most people, and my stomach, which I never treat kindly, objects strongly to changes of food and water. As for air travel—if Samuel Johnson had known about airports, flight overbooking, economy class legroom, airplane “cuisine,” and weather delays, he would have found something to top his remark on a sailor’s life, “a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”
If I have seen much of the world, it is only because for twenty years I have had the rare privilege of viewing most of it from a few hundred miles above it, in the form of satellite images. I can be given a Landsat or a SPOT scene, and tell you from its appearance the approximate location, latitude, season, and climate. Put me on the ground in that same location, and I would have no idea where I was or what to do. I would sweat, freeze, starve, or panic.
Now, having said all that I also have to confess to being a travel book junkie. I like nothing better than to sit in a comfortable armchair, struggling vicariously across the barren Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia, gasping in the rarefied air of the high Karakoram, or losing assorted fingers and toes on a winter journey to a colony of Emperor penguins. I yearn to visit Antarctica, Patagonia, and Serengeti, but only by spacecraft or the printed word. I like to travel, so to speak, clairvoyantly.
So when I came across a rare edition of the Travels of Marco Polo in a bookstore, I coveted it. A friend of mine was with me in the shop. He rolled his eyes at the price, and said, “You’ll have to write a new story to pay for that.”
He was right. I did, and you just read it.
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story: c-change
It was early in 2043 that Hippolyte Martin discovered the trick that increased the speed of light by a factor of sixty million.
Since his work began as pure theory, he checked for the usual pitfalls. Had he divided an equation by zero, or subtracted infinite quantities from each side, or taken the wrong branch of a multiple-valued function?
He had not. His work was without flaw—and translatable from theory to practice. Most staggering of all, the change in light-speed could be universal. Everywhere would be affected once his device was in operation.
Hippolyte was a responsible scientist, so he sought the validity check of peer review. He published his work—or tried to. But he made the mistake of stating the consequences of his discovery, rather than offering pure theory.
He noted that the center of the galaxy was ab
out thirty thousand light-years away. After the c-change that would become five light-hours. Even with ships hobbling along at one-hundredth of light speed, the whole galaxy was just a few weeks across. As for visits to the nearer stars, it was hardly worth taking along a change of clothing. Sirius and back, even allowing for the tedious business of acceleration and deceleration, was an afternoon jaunt.
Hippolyte made these points in his paper’s introduction. The rejection letters ranged from studiously polite to suggestions that he needed psychological help.
Lesser men might have despaired, become enraged, or turned misanthropic. Hippolyte, fortified by the knowledge that he was right, did none of these. He assembled his c-change generator on board his spaceship, a little one designed to putter along at only a thousandth of the speed of light. For Hippolyte had a way to silence the skeptics: he would turn on the generator, head for the stars, and return with proof.
His work might be accepted before his return. Newly generated light would be affected, while light already on its way somewhere would not; so there would be immediate visible results. The Sun was eight minutes light-travel time from Earth. When the c-change was made, for eight minutes there would be two suns in the sky. One of those suns would be “old” light, sent out eight minutes earlier; the other would be newly generated light, zipping from Sun to Earth in a few microseconds.
There would be similar effects all through astronomy. For forty minutes there would be two Jupiters; twin Saturns would last twice as long. Alpha Centauri would shine in duplicate for four years, Sirius nearly nine. The new sky would be cluttered, twice as bright and populous as before, but would return to normal over years and centuries as doppelganger planets and stars vanished, one by one.
Hippolyte turned on his generator. As expected, the sky showed twice as many stars. He headed for the brightest one.
He was back ten days later, a shaken man. Earth was waiting, just as shaken. Computers, control systems, and other advanced electronics had all become pieces of instant junk. For light is just one form of electromagnetic radiation, and when its speed changed the other forms changed with it.
On the fourth day, people had remembered Hippolyte’s “impossible” theory. They noted the disappearance of his ship from the solar vicinity. When he returned he was promptly charged with forty-nine civil offenses and eighty-six military ones.
He didn’t seem to care.
“I wanted to give us the stars,” he said. “So I built the generator. I’m sorry about the electronics. But it’s not important.”
His panel of judges boggled.
“Not important!” said the senior inquisitor. “Not important, to ruin the world’s economy, to destroy the banking system, to reduce to a shambles the computer and communications system—”
“Not important,” repeated Hippolyte. “You see, they are there. Just the way we imagined they might be. Advanced civilizations, millennia old, millions of years old, across the stars and galaxies.
“On my fourth planet I met their delegates. Three beings, all oxygen breathers. They treated me very nicely. They explained about the Intergalactic Trading Federation.”
“He is mad!” exclaimed the panels expert on the nonexistence of extraterrestrial intelligence. “It can be proved, by rigorous arguments, that interstellar commerce is impossible. In fact, regular interstellar travel of any kind cannot be accomplished. The distances are too large, the travel times too extreme.”
Hippolyte nodded. “I wondered myself how intergalactic commerce operated over such times and distances before the c-change. Yet they were there.” He stared bleakly at the panel. “Is there by any chance an astronomer among you?”
The others turned to a pale woman with red hair, who jerked upright at becoming the center of attention.
“You, madam?” asked Hippolyte. “You must have noticed astronomical effects. What was your explanation for them?”
“We noticed that every light source less than a hundred light-years away appeared in duplicate. Anything more than a hundred light-years away did not; but we had no explanation.”
“Then I, reluctantly, must give one.” Hippolyte sighed, and turned to face the cameras. “I increased the speed of light, and thought I had made the change to the whole universe. What I did not realize, until the beings who greeted me explained, was that the speed of light is already sixty million times as big as the old Earth-measured value. It has the higher value everywhere, except within a hundred light-years of Sol.
“And even within that hundred light-year sphere, the speed of light had its high value until ten thousand years ago. Until, in fact, the intergalactic federation had a first good look at humans. That was when they put in the slow-speed barrier.” The panel was stunned to silence. Finally, the senior member spoke. “But you changed all that, didn’t you? With your generator, we can go as fast—”
“No.” Hippolyte shook his head sadly. They are sorry, but they can’t risk it. The Sol region goes permanently back to slow-speed—tomorrow.”
afterword: c-change
See the Afterword to “The Seventeen-Year Locusts.”
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article: unclear winter
A Miscellany of Disasters
1.INTRODUCTION
The scenario is almost too familiar.
War breaks out between the United States and Russia. The cause of the final conflict is not relevant, but both sides unleash the full force of their nuclear arsenals. Within hours, the energy of 25,000 one-megaton hydrogen bombs has been released. Most of the United States and Russia, including all the major cities, is reduced to a flaming wilderness of destruction and radioactive contamination.
And then the real trouble starts.
The initial explosions, together with the fires that they have created, carry gigantic amounts of dust and smoke high into the upper atmosphere. It lingers there, blocking out sunlight, for months or years. On the surface below, temperatures drop dramatically. The earth is darkened, crops are frozen or fail to mature, and starvation becomes a universal problem. The civilization of the world collapses, and the development of humanity is set back for hundreds or thousands of years.
This is “nuclear winter,” a projected future that suggests that the Doomsday Machine of Dr. Strangelove is already in our possession. For it is not necessary that both sides release their bombs. If either one does, the subsequent winter will destroy the aggressor country along with the intended victim. A preemptive “first strike” does nothing to guarantee a nation’s security.
The general concept of nuclear winter is not new. It goes back at least to 1974, when a paper by J. Hampson was published in Nature. A year later, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report covering the same theme: “Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear-Weapon Detonations.” It assumed that 10,000 one-megaton hydrogen bombs would be used in an all-out nuclear war, and drew the conclusion that the effects on the whole ecosystem would be small. The report was somewhat criticized as encouraging military solutions to general political problems, but mostly it was ignored. The whole subject was apparently of minor interest until 1983, when a paper, “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions” was published by Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack and Sagan. This “TTAPS” paper and subsequent press conferences introduced the phrase “nuclear winter.” The idea then received wide circulation.
However, the validity of the TTAPS conclusions was not accepted everywhere. The subject quickly became a hot issue for debate. On the one hand, the proponents of nuclear winter felt that they had a new and irrefutable case against anyone who thought it might be possible to “win” a nuclear war. On the other hand, critics said the analysis was inadequate and misleading. The models were accused of being (literally) one-dimensional, of ignoring the heat reservoi
r capacity of the oceans, and of assuming that there would be too rapid atmospheric mixing, so that the southern hemisphere would suffer as badly as the northern one.
The Pentagon in particular didn’t want to hear anything about nuclear winter. If the idea were valid, it made the point that our arsenals are just as dangerous to us as to any possible enemy.
The criticisms of the original models seem to be valid. However, none of them proves that there will be no nuclear winter effects. They merely reduce the estimated size of the effect.
Reduce it, by how much?
No one is sure. There has never been an atmospheric nuclear explosion providing more than a thousandth of the energy release of a full-scale nuclear war. Also, even the biggest atmospheric tests were not conducted in areas where forest or urban fires could result. Thus all the arguments rely a great deal on theoretical (and simplified) results, on analogy, and on preconceived ideas. And the key question, what would all-out nuclear war do on a long-term global scale, remains unanswered. So does a rather different, but equally important question: how do the risks of nuclear winter compare with other forms of disaster?
2.THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS
All-out war is not the only way to produce the possible collapse of civilization predicted by nuclear winter. In this article we will examine some violent alternatives, and see how likely they are to serve as instruments as doom.
The production of nuclear winter effects, by any mechanism, calls for the release of a great deal of energy. The way that this energy is delivered to Earth’s biosphere is important, but the easiest way to begin is by looking at the raw energy provided by different events.
Here are some prime candidates:
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