Only the rocket had found the worst mark of the disaster: a belt of chaotic, fused terrain about three thousand kilometres across, apparently running clear around the planet on the equator.
Wigner and Pierce, in their darkened room, studied the Chinese tapes and reports; Pierce had even taken two days off to learn Chinese, rather than risk losing something in translation.
“Something hit us,” Wigner said. “Not an asteroid or comet. Looks as if we’ve been turned on a lathe.”
“Good comparison,” Pierce said. “The Chinese theory is a beam of some kind of energy. It hit us somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, just off Ecuador and moved west. The first strike vaporized the ocean under it, and then it just kept on going. Where the ocean had been, the sea bed was molten, so water coming in was also explosively vaporized. Even as far north as Batavia, the shock wave was strong enough to tear everything apart.”
“Like an atmospheric tsunami.”
“Of superheated steam. At least it was quick. Probably no one was left alive within twenty-four hours. But they estimate the energy beam was locked on us for seventeen days, going over more or less the same track. By that time the oceans and icecaps were gone as well as the atmosphere, just boiled away at well over escape velocity. The rocks under the beam were liquefied by then; some of the atmosphere that’s there now was boiled out of the crust.
“Then the beam just quit.” Pierce brought up a frame showing part of the southeast Asian coast and Hainan Island. Beyond their recognizable coastlines, the chaotic terrain extended far to the south. Even, without computer enhancement, the terrain showed a distinct boundary line, running roughly north-south. “That seems to be the spot. Since then, the whole surface has undergone severe earthquakes and volcanism. The sea beds are all rebounding, and the fusing of the crust along the equator temporarily locked a number of tectonic plates. They’ve started breaking apart again.”
“And that’s the source of the atmosphere.”
“The main source. Outgassing of carbon dioxide and methane.”
“And the radioactivity.”
“Right. Some came from space, but most was just the scattering of naturally occurring isotopes buried in the crust.”
“Do you think the bases on Mars and the moon could have survived?”
“No. The tank teams listened for signals. Nothing.”
Wigner turned up the office lights. “You said you wanted to go through to Beulah. Does it alarm you that I want to use you on Ulro instead?”
Pierce shrugged. “It alarms me, sure. But it’s more important than Beulah right now.”
“It’s more important than anything else in the world.”
“You have a bee in your bonnet about Ulro,” Clement said affably to Wigner. They were in the rear booth at Pietro’s enjoying pene all’arabbiata.
“I know, I know. With everyone going crazy about the downtime chronoplanes, I’m really out of step. But it’s a chance to sneak a look at the end of the story.”
“How so?”
Wigner privately reflected that a nation that promoted its intelligence officers on the basis of their looks, taste in sports attire, and prep schools deserved whatever it got.
“Remember that old phrase, ‘He’s history’? To the people on Ulro, we’re history.”
“I’m aware of the gist of what’s been found there, thank you.” Clement looked pained. Wigner ignored the sarcasm.
“The downtime worlds are going to be extremely useful to our political masters,” Wigner said. “But they still have to live in this world, which is unfortunately full of bad guys. We know who a lot of the bad guys are, but some of them are thoroughly unknown to us. They may be doing us a lot of damage right now, and we won’t know until it’s too late. Or they may be planning some very nasty moves, and we’ll be caught flatfooted. The bad guys’ reward will be to go into the history books of the twenty-first century. Our reward, if we find out about them first, will be to nip them in the bud.” Amazing how a conversation with Clement could sink so rapidly into cliché.
Clement bought time to wrestle with the concept by spearing a bit of pasta. He nodded energetically.
“Okay, an interesting point. We could, in theory, learn some useful stuff. But how are we going to find it? It’ll be like finding a needle in a haystack.”
“It’ll take a lot of preparation, I admit. But we know where our main repositories of information are in New York. We can assume that the Agency on Ulro maintained the same repositories until the collapse of the United States in 2011. They’re deep in the bedrock of Manhattan Island, among other places, and they very likely survived the catastrophe. If we can get through the surface debris, we can find the whole script for the next decade or two. All the leaders of the People’s Action Front. Who’s been funding the Wabbies. Which of our own people are working for the Soviets or the Japanese.”
Clement had either grasped the concept in its totality, or he had caught a red pepper between his teeth. He stared into the distance for a few seconds.
“It would certainly make our lives easier, wouldn’t it?” Clement said at last.
“Much.”
“Give them something to think about in Langley.”
“Especially if we could hand them six or seven spies all at once, and the Wabbies’ fundraisers.”
Clement’s eyebrows rose as he nodded again.
“Okay, I’m sold. Young Eric, you have a head on your shoulders.”
Better there than up my ass, Wigner thought.
Spring was late as always in Taos, and snow had fallen on the first flowers. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains blazed white in the sunshine. Pierce and his mother Annette walked downtown to the plaza. She was a tall woman, her greying brown hair cropped short, with a long stride and a smile as dazzling as her son’s.
“Not much like the old days,” she said as their feet squeaked and crunched on the snow. “Hardly any skiers any more. The artists have all starved or moved away. And not many tourists.”
“It’ll get better soon.”
“God, I hope so. I’d sure like a job again.” She was living on her late husband’s pension from the New Mexico State Police, and what Pierce sent her every month.
They walked past the old Piggly Wiggly supermarket, and his mother reminisced about the days, before he could remember, when you could buy anything you wanted in there and the parking lot had been clean and shaded by huge cottonwoods. Then the squatters had drifted in, and the food-stamp program had turned into rationing. Pierce remembered it when the market had become dim and shabby, patrolled by armed guards, but even after it became Federal Footstuffs Dispensary 1207, everyone still called it the Piggly Wiggly.
The plaza was almost deserted except for three or four Apaches in heavy blankets. The last effort at sprucing up the shops must have been over a decade ago, and the plaza looked sad.
“You never really explained how you got this new job,” Annette said as they window-shopped past forlorn craft displays of pots and weaving and water-colours.
“Met a guy who knew about the opening. He thought I’d work out, and I did.”
“He must have some clout, to get you out of the army.”
“I’m not out. I’m seconded. What the army calls TDY.”
“And what exactly have they got you doing TDY?”
“Reading a lot.”
“C’mon, Jerry, you can tell your poor old mom.”
“No, really. It’s a research project for the government, and that’s about all I can tell you.”
“It’s okay? Really okay?”
“It’s okay. Actually, it’s kind of interesting. And it pays better than the Idaho job.”
“Man, that blew my mind. My kid running a whole district, like a state governor or something. Weren’t you ever scared?”
“Sometimes. It was a lot of work.”
“You should hear the rumours about our T-Colonel. Little sawed-off Chicano guy. He sounds like a real bastard.”
�
�That’s the best kind.”
She laughed, and he enjoyed the sound of it. They went into a drugstore (the name had stuck, though all drugs were now sold only in federal pharmacies) and browsed through the magazines and paperbacks. The racks seemed quaint to Pierce. He was already used to fichemongers’ shops in New York, where Trainables could pick up such materials in microfiche strips for flickreaders.
“All this stuff about the chronoplanes.” Annette was scanning the newspaper headlines. “They’re talking about people emigrating to Eden, can you believe that? And those other places. Never catch me doing that.”
“Why not?” Pierce was surprised.
“I like it here. No drugstores in the eighteenth century.”
“It’s pretty nice, actually. Clean air and water, good soil, no toxics.”
“Leave it for the pioneers.”
He bought her a few magazines and a big bar of chocolate.
“Remember the time we got mugged for our groceries?” she said with a laugh. “That goddam Pete Gomez and his little gang. And I’d paid three damn stamps for a chocolate bar. It was supposed to be our big treat.”
“I remember.” He’d been too young and weak to protect her. The memory still burned.
“I saw his mother a few weeks ago. Poor Pete joined the army and got killed in Venezuela.”
“Cheaters never prosper.”
“Jerry! What an unforgiving bum you are.”
“It’s the secret of my success. Don’t you remember he mugged us again the next week, and we didn’t eat for two days, and you cried?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Those were lousy times for everybody.”
“Jerks like Pete helped make them that way.”
“Aw, come on. He was a kid. A hungry kid.”
“So was I.”
“Let’s go home and make some lunch, hungry kid.” Pierce regretted what he’d said, and made an effort to be cheerful and positive. He had come here, after all, to make sure he saw his mother at least this once before he went through to Ulro. No point in being unpleasant while he was here.
He was having bad dreams about Ulro.
For Jasmin Jones, lunch with Jonathan Clement was no perfunctory matter of popping down to Pietro’s to eat pasta and gossip. Instead, they walked west to the Museum of Modem Art on West 53rd to tour the exhibits before adjourning to a Greek restaurant nearby.
Jasmin restrained her impatience; Clement insisted on spending up to two minutes in front of works that she understood in seconds. Guernica required a reverent three minutes; Jaz passed the time by reviewing everything she knew about Picasso, which was a great deal.
The current main exhibit was a holographic retrospective of the works of the old avant-garde Swiss sculptor Tinguely. He had specialized in odd little machines, running on asynchronous gears, that rolled about in unpredictable ways and attempted to destroy one another or themselves. Jaz thought they were delightful, and the holograms themselves were beautifully sharp and lifelike reconstructions of machines long vanished.
“If a machine can be lifelike,” she murmured.
“Sorry?” said Clement.
“Nothing, just marvelling at the machines.”
“Great fun. The old modernists got more enjoyment out of their work than today’s artists do.”
“Too bad Tinguely never built his freeway machines.”
“I hadn’t heard of them.”
“One was supposed to roll down a freeway, painting an abstraction on the road. Another was supposed to follow, erasing the painting.”
Clement chuckled. “He didn’t build it because we already had the patent.”
Jaz burst out laughing. “That explains so much.” Their cheerful mood persisted through a lunch of Greek salad, tzatziki, and lamb souvlaki. Clement told stories about his early days in the Agency and dropped a few juicy bits of current gossip. Jaz offered nothing in exchange except her wide-eyed and appreciative attention.
She was curious to know what Clement’s agenda was: if it was sex, she was half tempted to accept because she considered him sexy, and half tempted to refuse because it would complicate her job. Come to think of it, accepting would complicate her job also.
Over coffee, he settled back and asked: “How are you enjoying your work these days?”
“I like the technical challenges, and I try not to think about the implications of the information.”
“Good attitude. How about your colleagues?” Tactful choice of words, she thought. Made her sound more professional. “I like everyone. They’re good people.”
“The best. I’m really lucky to have you all. But I’ve got one problem there.”
“Eric.”
His eyebrows rose. “Why do you say that?”
“Eric’s a little impatient with un-Trainables.”
“Well, you hit the bull’s eye, Jasmin. For some people Trainability is a blessing, and for some it’s almost a curse. And I’m not one of these no-brow bigots, believe me — far from it. We paid too high a price for that stupidity in the riots.”
Jasmin nodded. She had been just a kid during the worldwide anti-Trainable riots a few years back; she hadn’t even been old enough to be tested. But she remembered the two girls who had been lynched at Santa Monica High; one of them had lived two blocks away.
“Only it’s more than impatience,” said Clement. “I worry about the boy because I’m afraid he’s getting in over his head.”
“Ulro?”
“Oh, he’s probably on the right track there; we should be finding out what we can. But he’s taking on more responsibility than he can handle. Hell, he recruited some T-Colonel from out west, got me to hide the guy in some proprietary, and now he wants to send the guy through a screen to Ulro. I kind of admire his ambition, but if anything goes wrong it’ll reflect badly on him. Maybe even abort his career.”
So, Eric was really doing something to make friends, influence people, and eliminate the middleman. “Why not yank his chain a little?”
“I don’t want to discourage initiative. Not for a minute. Eric’s aggressiveness is one of his best qualities. He even reminds me of me when I was his age, all guts and no brains. The last thing we need, especially these days, is a bunch of yes-men and timeservers. The last thing. But I also don’t want something to blow up in my lap. So you could help me — and Eric — by keeping an eye on him. Find out what he’s thinking, what his motives are.”
Jasmin looked him straight in the eye, knowing that the impact of her big blue eyes could unsettle any normal heterosexual male. He looked straight back. “Jonathan, are you asking me to spy on Eric?”
“Jasmin, I certainly am.”
“All right.”
He nodded, smiling faintly. “I’m not asking you to do a Mata Hari. Just keep in touch with him, be a sympathetic listener, encourage him to share his feelings.”
She nodded and smiled. “I already do.”
To his credit, he didn’t try to pump her about what feelings he might already have shared. “Just keep me posted from time to time. And speaking of time, we’d better get back to the shop.”
They walked back in bright spring sunshine, through sparse crowds. These days most people ate close to work, or in the office; the street beggars were more persistent all the time and often got violent. Four Black youths followed Clement and Jasmin for half a block, asking half-heartedly for change. Clement finally tossed them a five-dollar coin, just to be rid of them.
“God,” he murmured, “I can’t wait to move all the jigs downtime. Solve eighty percent of our problems.”
CHAPTER VII
Training with a capital T was a method of drills and drugs that enabled Trainables to absorb visually obtained information at extremely high rates, and then to retrieve that information at once and in perfect detail. Training with a small t, simple kinaesthetic programming, was still a matter of time-consuming practice.
Through much of the spring and early summer, Pierce was in training. He spent several we
eks in Houston’s NASA facilities, accustoming himself to working in a Newtsuit, a rigid carbon-fibre diving suit modified for use in near-vacuum.
“You’re going to bump into too many pointy objects,” his trainer told him. “A fabric suit wouldn’t give you enough protection. Besides, the Newtsuit can carry a lot more shielding.”
Armoured, he plodded across dusty plains and up rocky gulches while monitoring scores of readouts around the inside of his helmet. Armoured, he dug through stony soil with picks and shovels, while the inside of the suit stank of sweat and urine. Armoured, he drove a tank over rugged terrain and from within it he operated the tank’s backhoe to take apart piles of broken concrete and dirt without triggering slides or cave-ins.
Off duty, he socialized very little with the training staff; instead, he retreated to his room with his flickreader and the latest information from Wigner about the chronoplanes.
Eleven of them had now been found downtime, scattered from the late eighteenth century to 73,000 years before the present. Four were in historical time: Beulah, Eden, Ahania in the late first century A.D., and Los, almost a thousand years before Christ. Albion, over 8,100 years before Christ, was in the early stages of the agricultural revolution. The rest — Ore, Luvah, Urthona, Vala, Thel, and Tharmas — were in various phases of the last ice age.
The photographs and tapes from the first exploring parties showed worlds of marvellous beauty: the glaciers on Urthona looming mistily above the Atlantic where Long Island would one day be; the wind blowing through the tall grasses and groves of the Sahara on Ore; the vast redwood forests on Los, extending from central California to Puget Sound; mammoth herds trooping across the muddy steppes of central Asia on Luvah.
The Fall of the Republic (The Chronoplane Wars Book 2) Page 8