Essays

by Gregory Benford

  "Oh, they will converge all right, lieutenant. The question is-- shall we be ready when they do?"

  My mind churned.

  The essential task in envisioning the future is a capacity for wonder. I had said as much to journalists. These Martians lived in a future of technological effects we could but imagine. Only through such visualization could we glimpse their Achilles heel.

  Now was the crucial moment when wonder, so long merely encased in idle talk, should spring forth to action.

  Wonder . . . a fine word, but what did it mean? Summoning up an inner eye, which could scale up the present, pregnant with possibility, into . . . into . . .

  What, then? Hertz, his waves, circuits, capacitors, wires --

  Beauchamp glanced nervously around. "Even if you could get the attention of the military --"

  "For such tasks the army is useless. I am thinking of something else." I said suddenly, filled with an assurance I could not explain. "The Martians will soon converge at the center of their obsession. And when they do, we shall be ready."

  "Ready with what?"

  "With what lies within our--" and here I thought of the pun, a glittering word soaring up from the shadowy subconscious "-- within our capacitance. "

  The events of that long night compressed for me. I had hit upon the kernel of the idea, but the implementation loomed like an insuperable barrier.

  Fortunately, I had not taken into account the skills of other men, especially the great leadership ability of my friend, M. Beauchamp. He had commanded a battalion against the Prussians, dominating his comer of the battlefield without runners. With more like him, Sedan would never have fallen. His voice rose above the streaming crowds, and plucked forth from that torrent those who still had a will to contest the pillage of their city. He pointed to my figure, whom many seemed to know. My heart swelled at the thought that Frenchmen -- and Frenchwomen! -- would muster to a hasty cause upon the mention of my name, encouraged solely by the thought that I might offer a way to fight back.

  I tried to describe my ideas as briskly as possible . . . but alas, brevity has never been my chief virtue. So I suppressed a flash of pique when the brash American, following the impulsive nature of his race, leaped up and shouted --

  "Of course! Verne, you clever old frog. You've got it!"

  -- and then, in vulgar but concise French, he proceeded to lay it all out in a matter of moments, conveying the practical essentials amid growing excitement from the crowd.

  With an excited roar, our makeshift army set at once to work.

  I am not a man of many particulars. But craftsmen and workers and simple men of manual dexterity stepped in while engineers, led by the Italian and the American, took charge of the practical details, charging about with the gusto of youth, unstoppable in their enthusiasm. In fevered haste, bands of patriots ripped the zinc sheets from bars. They scavenged the homes of the rich in search of silver. No time to beat it into proper electrodes -- they connected decanters and candlesticks into makeshift assortments. These they linked with copper wires, fetched from the cabling of the new electrical tramways.

  The electropotentials of the silver with the copper, in the proper conducting medium, would be monstrously reminiscent of the original "voltaic" pile of Alessandro Volta. In such a battery, shape does not matter so much as surface area, and proper wiring. Working through the smoky night, teams took these rode pieces and made a miracle of rare design. The metals they immersed in a salty solution, emptying the wine vats of the district to make room, spilling the streets red, and giving any true Frenchman even greater cause to think only of vengeance!

  These impromptu batteries, duplicated throughout the arrondissement, the quick engineers soon webbed together in a vast parallel circuit. Amid the preparations, M. Beauchamp and the English scientist inquired into my underlying logic.

  "Consider the simple equations of planetary motion," I said. "Even though shot from the Martian surface with great speed, the time to reach Earth must be many months, perhaps a year."

  "One can endure space for such a time?" Beauchamp frowned.

  "Space, yes. It is mere vacuum. Tanks of their air-- thin stuff, Professor Lowell assures us from his observations -- could sustain them. But think! These Martians, they must have intelligence of our rank. They left their kind to venture forth and do battle. Several years without the comforts of home, until they have subdued our world and can send for more of their kind."

  The Englishman seemed perplexed. "For more?"

  "Specifically, for their families, their mates . . . dare I say their wives! Though it would seem that not all were left behind. At least one came along in the first wave, out of need for her expertise, perhaps, or possibly she was smuggled along on the ill-fated missile that our forces captured."

  Beauchamp bellowed. "Zut! The four-legged one. There are reports of no others. You are right, Verne. It must be rare to bring one of that kind so close to battle!"

  The Englishman shook his head. "Even if this is so, I do not follow how it applies to this situation." He gestured toward where the three terrible machines were nearing the tower, their gyrations now tight, their dance more languorous. Carefully, reverentially, yet with a clear longing they reached out to the great spire that Paris had almost voted to tear down, just a few years after the Grand Exhibition ended. Now all our hopes were founded in the city's wise decision to let M. Eiffel's masterpiece stand.

  The Martians stroked its base, clasped the thick parts of the tower's curving thigh -- and commenced slowly to climb.

  Beauchamp smirked at the English scholar, perhaps with a light touch of malice. "I expect you would not understand, sir. It is not in your national character to fathom this, ah, ritual."

  "Humph!" Unwisely, the Englishman used Beauchamp's teasing as cause to take offense. "I'll wager that we give these Martians a whipping before your lot does!"

  "Ah yes," Beauchamp remarked. "Whipping is more along the lines of the English, I believe."

  With a glance, I chided my dear friend. After all, our work was now done. The young, the skilled, and the brave had the task well in hand. Like generals who have unleashed their regiments beyond recall, we had only to observe, awaiting either triumph or blame.

  At dawn, an array of dozens and dozens of Volta batteries lay scattered across the south bank of the Seine. Some fell prey to rampages by smaller Martian machines, while others melted under hasty application of fuming acids. Cabling wound through streets where buildings burned and women wept. Despite all obstacles of flame, rubble, and burning rays, all now terminated at Eiffel's tower.

  The Martians' ardent climb grew manifestly amorous as the sun rose in piercing brilliance; warming our chilled bones: I was near the end of my endurance, sustained only by the excitement of observing Frenchmen and women fighting back with ingenuity and rare unity. But as the Martians scaled the tower-- driven by urges we can guess by analogy alone -- I began to doubt. My scheme was simple, but could it work?

  I conferred with the dark Italian who supervised the connections.

  "Potentials? Voltages?" He screwed up his face. "Who has had-a time to calculate. All I know, M'sewer, iz that we got-a plenty juice. You want-a fry a fish, use a hot flame."

  I took his point. Even at comparatively low voltages, high currents can destroy any organism. A mere fraction of an Ampere can kill a man, if his skin is made a reasonable conductor by application of water, for example. Thus, we took it as a sign of a higher power at work, when the bright sun fell behind a glowering black cloud, and an early mist rolled in from the north. It made the tower slick beneath the orange lamps we had festooned about it.

  And still the Martians climbed.

  It was necessary to coordinate the discharge of so many batteries in one powerful jolt, a mustering of beta rays. Pyrotechnicians had taken up positions beside our command post, within sight of the giant, spectral figures which now had mounted a third of the way up the tower.

  "Hey Verne!" The American shouted,
with well-meant impudence. "You're on !"

  I turned to see that a crowd had gathered. Their expressions of tense hope touched this old man's heart. Hope and faith in my idea. There would be no higher point in the life of a fabulist.

  "Connect!" I cried. "Loose the hounds of electrodynamics!"

  A skyrocket leaped forth, trailing sooty smoke-- a makeshift signal, but sufficient.

  Down by the river and underneath a hundred ruins, scores of gaps and switches closed. Capacitors arced. A crackling rose from around the city as stored energy rushed along the copper cabling. I imagined for an instant the onrushing mob of beta rays, converging on --

  The invaders suddenly shuddered, and soon there emerged thin, high cries, screams that were the first sign of how much like us they were, for their wails rose in hopeless agony, shrieks of despair from mouths which breathed lighter air than we, but knew the same depths of woe.

  They toppled one by one, tumbling in the morning mist, crashing to shatter on the trampled lawns and cobblestones of the ironically named Champ-de-Mars . . . marshaling ground of the god of war, and now graveyard of his planetary champions.

  The lesser machines, deprived of guidance, soon reeled away, some falling into the river, and many others destroyed by artillery, or even enraged mobs. So the threat ebbed from its horrid peak . . . at least for the time being.

  As my reward for these services, I would ask that the site be renamed, for it was not the arts of battle which turned the metal monsters into burning slag. Nor even Zeus's lightning, which we had unleashed. In the final analysis, it was Aphrodite who had come to the aid of her favorite city.

  What a fitting way for our uninvited guests to meet their end -- to die passionately in Paris, from a fatal love.

  GREGORY BENFORD

  Ten Thousand Years Of Solitude

  ONE OF THE chores of physics professors everywhere is fielding telephone calls which come into one's department. Sometimes they ask "What was that I saw in the sky last night?" -- to which I reply, "Could you describe it?" This makes for quick work; usually they've seen an aircraft or Venus.

  Sometimes calls are from obvious cranks, the sort who earnestly implore you to look over their new theory of the cosmos, or their device for harnessing magnetism as a cure to the world's energy needs. These I accord a firm diplomacy. Any polite pivot that gets one off the line is quite all right. One of the few rules we do follow is that one may not deflect the call to another professor!

  In 1989 I got a call which at first seemed normal, from a fellow who said he was from Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Then I sniffed a definite, classic odor of ripe crank.

  "Let me get this straight," I said. "The House of Representatives has handed down a requirement on the Department of Energy. They want a panel of experts to consider a nuclear waste repository and assess the risks that somebody might accidentally intrude on it for . . ."

  "That's right, for ten thousand years."

  I paused. He sounded solid, without the edgy fervor of the garden variety crank. Still . . .

  "That's impossible, of course."

  "Sure," he said. "I know that. But this is Congress."

  We both laughed. I knew he was okay.

  So it came to be that a few months later I descended in a wire-cage elevator, clad in hard hat with head lamp and goggles, and carrying on my belt an emergency oxygen pack. I had a numbered brass tag on my wrist, too -- "For identification," the safety officer had said.

  "Why?" I had asked.

  She looked uncomfortable. "Uh, in case you, uh . . ."

  "In case my body can't be identified?"

  "Well, we don't expect anything, of course, but you know rules."

  We rattled downward for long minutes as I pondered the highest risk here: a flash fire that would overwhelm the air conduits, smothering everyone working in the kilometer-long Waste Isolation Pilot Plant outside Carlsbad, New Mexico.

  We clattered to a stop 2150 feet down in the salt flat. The door slid aside and our party of congressionally authorized experts on the next ten thousand years filed out into a bright, broad corridor a full thirty-three feet wide and thirteen feet high. It stretched on like a demonstration of the laws of perspective, with smaller hallways branching off at regular intervals.

  Huge machines had carved these rectangular certainties, leaving dirty-gray walls which felt cool and hard (and tasted salty, I couldn't resist). Flood lights brought everything into sharp detail, like a 1950s sf movie--engineers in blue jump suits whining past in golf cans, helmeted workers with fork lifts and clipboards, a neat, professional air.

  We climbed into golf carts with WIPP DOE stenciled on them, and sped among the long corridors and roomy alcoves. Someone had quietly inquired into possible claustrophobic tendencies among our party, but there seemed little risk. The place resembles a sort of subterranean, Borgesian, infinite parking garage. It had taken fifteen years to plan and dig, at the mere cost of a billion dollars. Only the government, I mused idly, could afford such parking fees . . .

  Nuclear waste is an ever-growing problem. It comes in several kinds --highly radioactive fuel rods from reactors, shavings from nuclear war-head manufacture, and a vast mass of lesser, lightly radioactive debris such as contaminated clothes, plastic liners, pyrex tubes, beakers, drills, pipes, boxes, and casings.

  Fifty years into the Nuclear Age, no country has actually begun disposing of its waste in permanent geologic sites. Many methods have been proposed. The most plausible is placing waste in inert areas, such as salt flats. Also promising would be dropping waste to the deep sea bed and letting subduction (the sucking in of the earth's mantle material to lower depths) take it down. Subduction zones have a thick silt the consistency of peanut butter, so that a pointed canister packed with radioactives would slowly work its way down. Even canister leaks seem to prefer to ooze downward, not percolate back up. (A few million years later, fossil wrist watches and lab gear could appear in fresh mountain ranges.) Finally, the highest-tech solution would be launching it into the sun.

  All these have good features and bad, but the more active solutions seem politically impossible. Law of the Sea treaties, opposition to launching anything radioactive, and a general, pervasive Not In My Backyard-ism are potent forces.

  The only method to survive political scrutiny is the Pilot Project, sitting in steel buildings amid utter desert waste forty-five minutes' drive from Carlsbad. The Department of Energy regards it as an experimental facility, and has fought endless rounds with environmentalists within and without New Mexico. Should they be allowed to fill this site with eight hundred thousand barrels of low-grade nuclear waste -- rags, rubber gloves, wiring, etc.? It is to be packed into ordinary 55-gallon soft-steel drums, which will then be stacked to the ceilings of the wide alcoves which sprout off from the ample halls.

  We climbed out of our carts and inspected the chunks of dirty salt carved from the walls by the giant boring machines. Everything looks imposingly solid, especially when one remembers that 2150 feet of rock hang overhead.

  But the point of the Pilot Project is that the walls are not firm at all. This Euclidean regularity was designed to flow, ooze, collapse.

  We trooped into a circular room with a central shaft of carved salt. Meters placed around the area precisely recorded the temperature as electrical heaters pumped out steady warmth. The air was close, uncomfortable. I blinked, feeling woozy. Were the walls straight? No --they bulged inward. There was nothing wrong with my eyes.

  Salt creeps. Warm up rock salt and it steadily fills in any vacancy, free of cracks or seams. This room had begun to close in on the heaters in a mere year. Within fifteen years of heating by radioactive waste left here, the spacious alcoves would wrap a final hard embrace around the steel drums. The steel would pop, disgorging the waste. None would leak out because the dense salt makes perfect seals -- as attested by the lack of ground water penetration anywhere in the immense salt flat, nearly a hundred miles on a side.

&nb
sp; "Pilot" is a bureaucrat's way of saying two things at once: "This is but the first," plus "we believe it will work, but . . ." Agencies despise uncertainties, but science is based on doing experiments which can fail.

  Often, scientific "failure" teaches you more than success. When Michaelson and Morley searched for signs of the Earth's velocity through the hypothetical ether filling all space, they came up empty-handed. But this result pointed toward Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, which assumed that such an ether did not exist, and that light had the same velocity no matter how fast one moved, or what direction.

  An experiment which gives you a clear answer is not a failure; it can surprise you, though. Failure comes only when an experiment answers no question -- usually because it's been done with ignorance or sloppiness. The true trick in science is to know what question your experiment is truly asking.

  Bureaucrats aren't scientists; they fear failure, by which they mean unpredictability. They tread a far more vexing territory: technology. The Pilot Project has been held up because equipment did not work quite right, because there are always uncertainties in geological data, and of course, because environmental impact statements can embrace myriad possibilities.

  Ours was the furthest-out anyone in government had ever summoned forth. No high technology project is a child of science alone; politics governs. The pressure on this Pilot Project arose from the fifty years of waste loitering in "temporary" storage on the grounds of nuclear power plants, weapons manufacturers and assorted medical sites -- in "swimming pools" of water which absorb the heat (but can leak), in rusting drums stacked in open trenches or in warehouses built in the 1950s. The long paralysis of all nuclear waste programs is quite probably more dangerous than any other policy, for none of our present methods was ever designed to work for even this long. Already some sites have measured slight waste diffusion into topsoil; we are running out of time.