"Science demands patience."
David smiled. "Yes. It always has. But for some it is hard to remain patient, in the face of the black meteor which approaches us all."
"The Wormwood? But that's centuries off."
"But scientists are hardly alone in being affected by the knowledge of its existence. There is an impulse to hurry, to gather as much data and formulate new theo- ries, to leam as much as possible in the time that is left— because we no longer are sure there will be anybody to build on our work, as we've always assumed in the past. And so people take shortcuts, the peer review process is under pressure ..."
Now a red alert light started flashing high on the countinghouse wall, and technicians began to drift back into the room.
Bobby looked at David quizzically. "You're setting up to run again? You told Dad you only ran one trial a day."
David winked. "A little white lie. I find it useful to have a way to get rid of him."
Bobby laughed.
It turned out there was time to fetch coffee before the new run began. They walked together to the cafeteria.
Bobby is lingering, David thought. As if he wants to be involved. He sensed a need here, a need he didn't understand—perhaps even envy. Was that possible?
It was a wickedly delicious thought. Perhaps Bobby Patterson, fabulously rich, this latter-day dandy, envies me—his earnest, dronelike brother.
Or perhaps that's just sibling rivalry on my part.
Walking back, he sought to make conversation.
"So. Were you a grad student, Bobby?"
"Sure. But at HBS."
"HBS? Oh. Harvard—"
"Business School. Yes."
"I took some business studies as part of my first de- gree," David said. He grimaced. "The courses were in- tended to 'equip us for the modem world.' All those two-by-two matrices, the fads for this theory or that, for one management guru or another ..."
"Well, business analysis isn't rocket science, as we used to say," Bobby murmured evenly. "But nobody at Harvard was a dummy. I won my place there on merit. And the competition there was ferocious."
"I'm sure it was." David was puzzled by Bobby's flat tone of voice, his lack of fire. He probed gently. "I have the impression you feel—underestimated."
Bobby shrugged- "Perhaps. The VR division of OurWorld is a billion-buck business in its own right. If I fail, Dad's made it clear he's not going to bail me out. But even Kate thinks I'm some kind of placeholder." Bobby grinned. "I'm enjoying trying to convince her otherwise."
David frowned. Kate? ... Ah, the girl reporter Hiram had tried to exclude from his son's life. Without success, it seemed. Interesting. "Do you want me to keep quiet?"
"What about?"
"Kate. The reporter—"
"There isn't really anything o keep quiet about."
"Perhaps. But Father doesn't approve of her. Have you told him you're still seeing her?"
"No."
And this may be the only thing in your young life, David thought, which Hiram doesn't know about. Well, let's keep it that way. David felt pleased to have estab- lished this small bond between them.
Now the countdown clock neared its conclusion. Once more the wall-mounted SoftScreen showed an inky dark- ness, broken only by random pixel flashes, and with the numeric monitor in the comer dully repeating its test list of primes. David watched with amusement as Bobby's lips silently formed the count numbers: Three. Two. One.
And then Bobby's mouth hung open in shock, a flick- ering light playing on his face.
David swiveled his gaze to the SoftScreen.
This time there was an image, a disc of light. It was a bizarre, dreamy construct of boxes and strip lights and cables, distorted almost beyond recognition, as if seen through some grotesque fish-eye lens.
David found he was holding his breath. As roe image stayed stable for two seconds, three, he deliberately sucked in air.
Bobby asked, "What are we seeing?"
"The wonnhole mouth. Or rather, the light it's pulling in from its surroundings, here, me Wormworks. Look, you can see the electronics stack. But the strong gravity of the mouth is dragging in light from me three- dimensional space all around it. The image is being dis- torted."
"Like gravitational tensing."
He looked at Bobby in surprise- "Exactly that." He checked the monitors. "We're already passing our pre- vious best...."
Now the distortion of the image became stronger, as the shapes of equipment and light fixtures were smeared to circles surrounding me view's central point. Some of the colors seemed to be Doppler-shiiting now, a green support strut starting to look blue, the fluorescents' glare taking on a tinge of violet.
"We're pushing deeper into the wormhole," David whispered. "Don't give up on me now."
The image fragmented further, its elements crumbling and multiplying in a repeating pattern around the disc- shaped image. It was a three-dimensional kaleidoscope, David thought, formed by multiple images of the lab's illumination. He glanced at counter readouts, which told him that much of the energy of the light falling into the wormhole had been shifted to the ultraviolet and beyond, and the energized radiation was pounding the curved walls of this spacetime tunnel.
But the wormhole was holding.
They were far past the point where all previous ex- periments had collapsed.
Now the disc image began to shrink as the light, fall- ing from three dimensions onto the wormhole mouth, was compressed by the wormhole's throat into a narrow- ing pipe- The scrambled, shrinking puddle of light reached a peak of distortion.
And then the quality of light changed. The multiple- image structure became simpler, expanding, seeming to unscramble itself, and David began to pick out elements of a new visual field: a smear of blue that might be sky, a pale white that could be an instrument box.
He said: "Call Hiram."
Bobby said, "What are we looking at?"
"Just call Father, Bobby."
Hiram arrived at a run an hour later. "It better be worth it. I broke up an investors' meeting ..."
David, wordlessly, handed him a slab of lead-glass crystal the size and shape of a pack of cards. Hiram turned the slab over, inspecting it.
The upper surface of the slab was ground into a mag- nifying lens, and when HiramJooked into it, he saw miniaturized electronics: photomultiplier light detectors for receiving signals, a light-emitting diode capable of emitting flashes for testing, a small power supply, min- iature electromagnets. And, at the geometric center of the slab, there was a tiny, perfect sphere, just at the limit of visibility. It looked silvery, reflective, like a pearl; but the quality of light it returned wasn't quite the hard gray of the countinghouse's fluorescents.
Hiram turned to David. "What am I looking at?"
David nodded at the big wall SoftScreen. It showed a round blur of light, blue and brown.
A face came looming into the image: a human face, a man somewhere in his forties, perhaps. The image was heavily distorted—it was exactly as if he had pushed his face into a fish-eye lens—but David could make out a knot of curly black hair, leathery sun-beaten skin, white teeth in a broad smile.
"It's Walter," Hiram said, wondering. "Our Brisbane station head." He moved closer to Ehe SoftScreen. "He's saying something. His lips are moving." He stood there, mouth moving in sympathy. "/... see ... you. I see you. My God."
Behind Walter, other Aussie technicians could be seen now, heavily distorted shadows, applauding in silence.
David grinned, and submitted to Hiram's whoops and bear hugs, all the while keeping his eye on the lead- glass slab containing the wormhole mouth, that billion- dollar pearl.
THE WORMCAM
It was 3 A.M. At the heart of the deserted Wormworks, in a bubble of SoftScreen light, Kate and Bobby sat side by side. Bobby was working through a simple question-and-answer setup session on the SoftScreen. They were expecting a long night; behind them there was a heap of hastily gathered gear, coffee flasks a
nd blankets and foam mattresses.
... There was a creak. Kate jumped and grabbed Bobby's arm.
Bobby kept working at the program. 'Take it easy. Just a little thermal contraction. I told you, I made sure all the surveillance systems have a blind spot right here, right now."
"I'm not doubting it. It's just that I'm not used to creeping around in the dark like this."
"I thought you were the tough reporter."
"Yes. But what I do is generally legal."
"GenerallyT
"Believe it or not."
"But this—" He waved a hand toward the hulking, mysterious machinery out in the dark. "—isn't even sur- veillance equipment. It's just an experimental high- energy physics rig. There's nothing like it in the world; how can there be any legislation to cover its use?"
"That's specious, Bobby. No judge on the planet would buy that argument."
"Specious or not, I'm telling you to calm down. I'm trying to concentrate. Mission Control here could be a little more user-friendly. David doesn't even use voice activation. Maybe all physicists are so conservative—or all Catholics."
She studied him as he worked steadily at the program. He looked as alive as she'd ever seen him, for once fully engaged in the moment. And yet he seemed completely unperturbed by any moral doubt. He really was a com- plex person—or rather, she thought sadly, incomplete.
His finger hovered over a start button on the Soft- Screen. "Ready. Shall I do it?"
"We're recording?"
He tapped the SoftScreen. "Everything that comes through that wormhole will be trapped right here."
"... Okay."
"Three, two, one." He hit the key.
The 'Screen turned black.
From the greater darkness around her, she heard a deep bass hum as the giant machinery of the Worm- works came on line, huge forces gathering to rip a hole in spacetime. She thought she could smell ozone, feel a prickle of electricity. But maybe that was imagination.
Setting up this operation had been simplicity itself. While Bobby had worked to obtain clandestine access to the Wonnworks equipment, Kate had made her way to Billybob's mansion, a gaudy baroque palace set in woodland on the fringe of the Mount Rainier National Park. She'd taken sufficient photographs to construct a crude external map of the site, and had made Global Positioning System readings at various reference points. That—and the information Billybob had boastfully given away to style magazines about the lavish interior layout—had been sufficient for her to construct a de- tailed internal map of the building, complete with a grid of GPS references.
Now, if all went well, those references would be suf- ficient to establish a wormhole link between Billybob's inner sanctum and this mocked-up listening post.
... The SoftScreen lit up. Kate leaned forward.
The image was heavily distorted, a circular smear of light, orange and brown and yellow, as if she were look- ing through a silvered tunnel. There was a sense of movement, patches of light coming and going across the image, but she could make out no detail.
"I can't see a damn thing," she said querulously.
Bobby tapped at the SoftScreen. "Patience. Now I have to cut in the deconvolution routines."
"The what?"
'The wormhole mouth isn't a camera lens, remember. It's a little sphere on which light falls from all around, in three dimensions. And that global image is pretty much smeared out by its passage through the wormhole itself. But we can use software routines to unscramble all that. It's kind of interesting. The software is based on programs the astronomers use to factor out atmo- spheric distortion, twinkling and blurring and refraction, when they study the stars—"
The image abruptly cleared, and Kate gasped.
They saw a massive desk with a globe-lamp hovering above. There were papers and SoftScreens scattered over the desktop. Behind the desk was an empty chair, ca- sually pushed back. On the walls there were performance graphs and bar charts, what looked like accounting state- ments.
There was luxury here. The wallpaper looked like handmade English stuff, probably the most expensive in tfie world. And on the floor, casually thrown there, there was a pair of rhino hides, gaping mouths and glassy eyes staring, horns proud even in death.
And there was a simple animated display, a total counting steadily upward. It was labeled CONVERTS: hu- man souls being counted like a fast-food chain's sushi- burger sales.
The image was far from perfect. It was dark, grainy, sometimes unstable, given to freezing or breaking up into clouds of pixels. But still—
"I can't believe it," Kate breathed. "It's working. It's as if all the walls in the world just turned to glass. Wel- come to the goldfish bowl...."
Bobby worked his SoftScreen, making the recon- structed image pan around. "I thought rhinos were ex- tinct."
'They are now. Billybob was involved in a consor- tium which bought out the last breeding pair from a pri- vate zoo in France. The geneticists had been trying to get hold of the rhinos to store genetic material, maybe eggs and sperm and even zygotes, in the hope of restor- ing the species in the future. But Billybob got there first. And so he owns the last rhino skins there will ever be. It was good business, if you look at it that way. These skins command unbelievably high prices now."
"But illegal."
"Yes. But nobody is likely to have the guts to pursue a prosecution against someone as powerful as Billybob. After all, come Wormwood Day, all the rhinos will be extinct anyhow; what difference does it make? ... Can you zoom with this thing?"
"Metaphorically.-1 can magnify and enhance selec- tively."
"Can we see those papers on the desk?"
With a fingernail Bobby marked out zoom boxes, and the software's focus progressively moved in on the litter of papers on the desktop. The wormhole mouth seemed to be positioned about a meter from the ground, some two meters from the desk—Kate wondered if it would be visible, a tiny reflective bead hovering in the air—so the papers were foreshortened by perspective. And be- sides they hadn't been laid out for convenient reading; some of them were lying facedown or were obscured by others. Still, Bobby was able to pick out sections—he inverted the images and corrected for perspective distor- tion, cleaned them up with intelligent-software enhance- ment routines—enough for Kate to get a sense of what much of the material was about.
It was mostly routine corporate stuff—chilling evi- dence of Billybob's industrial-scale mining of gullible Americans—but nothing illegal. She had Bobby scan on, rooting hastily through the scattered material.
And then, at last, she hit pay dirt.
"Hold it," she said. "Enhance.... Well, well." It was a report, technical, closely printed, replete with figures, on the adverse effects of dopamine stimulation in elderly subjects. "That's it," she breathed. "The smoking gun." She got up and started to pace the room, unable to con- tain her restless energy. "What an asshole. Once a drug dealer, always a drug dealer. If we can get an image of Billybob himself reading that, better yet signing it off— Bobby, we need to find him."
Bobby sighed and sat back. "Then ask David. I can swivel and zoom, but right now I don't know how to make this WormCam pan."
" 'WormCam'?" Kate grinned.
"Dad works his marketeers even harder than his en- gineers. Look, Kate, it's three-thirty in the morning. Let's be patient. I have security Jockout here until noon tomorrow. Surely we can catch Billybob in his office before then. If not, we can try again another day."
"Yes." She nodded, tense. "You're right. It's just I'm used to working fast."
He smiled. "Before some other hot joumo muscles in on your scoop?"
"It happens."
"Hey." Bobby reached out and cupped her chin in his hands. His dark face was all but invisible in the cavern- ous gloom of the Wormworks, but his touch was warm, dry, confident. "You don't have to worry. Just mink of it. Right now nobody else on the planet, nobody, has access to WormCam technology. There's no way Bil- lybob can detect what we're up to, or anyone
else can beat you to the punch. What's a few hours?"
Her breathing was shallow, her heart pumping; she seemed to sense him before her in the dark, at a level deeper than sight or scent or even touch, as if some deep core inside her was responding to the warm bulk of his body.
Arthur C Clarke - Light Of Other Days Page 8