The Light of Other Days

by Arthur C. Clarke

  The tech went away beaming.

  The facility’s cafeteria was tucked into the corner of the ‘countinghouse,’ the computing center where data from the various experiments run here were analysed. The counting house itself, characteristic of Hiram’s cost conscious operations, was minimal, just a temporary office module with a plastic tile floor, fluorescent ceiling panels, wood-effect plastic workstation partitions. It was jammed with computer terminals, SoftScreens, oscilloscopes and other electronic equipment. Cables and light fibre ducts snaked everywhere, bundles of them taped to the walls and floor and ceiling. There was a complex smell of electrical-equipment ozone, of stale coffee and sweat.

  The cafeteria itself had turned out to be a dismal shack with plastic tables and vending machines, all maintained by a battered drone robot. Hiram and his two sons sat around a table, arms folded, avoiding each other’s eyes.

  Hiram dug into a pocket and produced a handkerchief sized SoftScreen, smoothed it flat. He said, “I’ll get to the point. On. Replay. Cairo.”

  David watched the ’Screen. He saw, through a succession of brief scenes, some kind of medical emergency unfolding in sun-drenched Cairo. Egypt: stretcher-bearers carrying bodies from buildings, a hospital crowded with corpses and despairing relatives and harassed medical staff, mothers clutching the inert bodies of infants, screaming.

  “Dear God.”

  “God seems to have been looking the other way,” Hiram said grimly. “This happened this morning. Another water war. One of Egypt’s neighbours dumped a toxin in the Nile. First estimates are two thousand dead, ten thousand ill, many more deaths expected.

  “Now.” He tapped the little ’Screen. “Look at the picture quality. Some of these images are from handheld cams, some from drones. All taken within ten minutes of the first reported outbreak by a local news agency. And here’s the problem.” Hiram touched the corner of the image with his fingernail. It bore a logo: ENO, the Earth News Online network, one of Hiram’s bitterest rivals in the news-gathering field. Hiram said, “We tried to strike a deal with the local agency, but ENO scooped us.” He looked at his sons. “This happens all the time. In fact, the bigger I get, the more sharp little critters like ENO snap at my heels.

  “I keep camera crews and stringers all around the world, at considerable expense. I have local agents on every street corner across the planet. But we can’t be everywhere. And if we aren’t there it can take hours, days even to get a crew in place. In the twenty-four-hour news business, believe me, being a minute late is fatal.”

  David frowned. “I don’t understand. You’re talking about competitive advantage? People are dying here, right in front of your eyes.”

  “People die all the time,” said Hiram harshly. “People die in wars over resources, like in Cairo here, or over fine religious or ethnic differences, or because some bloody typhoon or flood or drought hits them as the climate goes crazy, or they just plain die. I can’t change that. If I don’t show it, somebody else will. I’m not here to argue morality. What I’m concerned about is the future of my business. And right now I’m losing out. And that’s why I need you. Both of you.”

  Bobby said bluntly, “First tell us about our mothers.”

  David held his breath.

  Hiram gulped his coffee. He said slowly, “All right. But there really isn’t much to tell. Eve — David’s mother — was my first wife.”

  “And your first fortune,” David said dryly.

  Hiram shrugged. “We used Eve’s inheritance as seedcorn money to start the business. It’s important that you understand, David. I never ripped off your mother. In the early days we were partners. We had a kind of long range business plan. I remember we wrote it out on the back of a menu at our wedding reception… We hit every bloody one of those targets, and more. We multiplied your mothers fortune tenfold. And we had you.”

  “But you had an affair, and your marriage broke up,” David said.

  Hiram eyed David. “How judgemental you are. Just like your mother.”

  “Just tell us, Dad,” Bobby pressed.

  Hiram nodded. “Yes, I had an affair. With your mother, Bobby. Heather, she was called. I never meant it to be this way… David, my relationship with Eve had been failing for a long time. That damn religion of hers.”

  “So you threw her out.”

  “She tried to throw me out — I wanted us to come to a settlement, to be civilized about it. In the end she ran out on me — taking you with her.”

  David leaned forward. “But you cut her out of your business interests. A business you had built on her money.”

  Hiram shrugged. “I told you I wanted a settlement. She wanted it all. We couldn’t compromise.” His eyes hardened. “I wasn’t about to give up everything I’d built up. Not on the whim of some religion-crazed nut. Even if she was my wife, your mother. When she lost her all-or-nothing suit, she went to France with you, and disappeared off the face of the Earth. Or tried to.” He smiled, “It wasn’t hard to track you down.” Hiram reached for his arm, but David pulled back. “David, you never knew it, but I’ve been there for you. I found ways to, umm, help you out, without your mother knowing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say you owe everything you have to me, but -”

  David felt anger blaze. “What makes you think I wanted your help?”

  Bobby said, “Where’s your mother now?”

  David tried to calm down. “She died. Cancer. It could have been easier for her. We couldn’t afford -”

  “She wouldn’t let me help her,” Hiram said. “Even at the end she pushed me away.”

  David said, “What do you expect? You took everything she had from her.”

  Hiram shook his head. “She took something more important from me. You.”

  “And so,” Bobby said coldly, “you focused your ambition on me.”

  Hiram shrugged. “What can I say? Bobby, I gave you everything — everything. I’d have given both of you. I prepared you as best I could.”

  “Prepared?” David laughed, bemused. “What kind of word is that?”

  Hiram thumped the table. “If Joe Kennedy can do it, why not Hiram Patterson? Don’t you see, boys? There’s no limit to what we can achieve, if we work together…”

  “You are talking about politics?” David eyed Bobby’s sleek, puzzled face. “Is that what you intend for Bobby? Perhaps the Presidency itself?” He laughed. “You are exactly as I imagined you, Father.”

  “And how’s that?”

  “Arrogant. Manipulative.”

  Hiram was growing angry. “And you are just as I expected. As pompous and pious as your mother.”

  Bobby was staring at his father, bemused.

  David stood. “Perhaps we have said enough.”

  Hiram’s anger dissipated immediately. “No. Wait. I’m sorry. You’re right. I didn’t drag you all the way over here to fight with you. Sit down and hear me out. Please.”

  David remained on his feet. “What do you want of me?”

  Hiram sat back and studied him. “I want you to build a bigger wormhole for me.”

  “How much bigger?”

  Hiram took a breath. “Big enough to look through.”

  There was a long silence.

  David sat down, shaking his head. “That’s -”

  “Impossible? I know. But let me tell you anyhow.” Hiram got up and walked around the cluttered cafeteria, gesturing as he talked, animated, excited. “Suppose I could immediately open up a wormhole from my newsroom in Seattle direct to this story event in Cairo — and suppose that wormhole was wide enough to transmit pictures from the event — I could feed images from anywhere in the world straight into the network, with virtually no delay. Right? Think about it. I could fire my stringers and remote crews, reducing my costs to a fraction. I could even set up some kind of automated search facility, continually keeping watch through short-lived wormholes, waiting for the next story to break, wherever and whenever. There’s really no limit.”

  Bobby smiled weak
ly. “Dad, they’d never scoop you again.”

  “Bloody right.” Hiram turned to David. “That’s the dream. Now tell me why it’s impossible.”

  David frowned. “It’s hard to know where to start. Right now you can establish metastable DataPipes between two fixed points. That’s a considerable achievement in itself. But you need a massive piece of machinery at each end to anchor each wormhole mouth. Correct? Now you want to open up a stable wormhole mouth at the remote end, at your news story’s location, without the benefit of any kind of anchor.”

  “Correct.”

  “Well, that’s the first thing that’s impossible, as I’m sure your technical people have been telling you.”

  “So they have. What else?”

  “You want to use these wormholes to transmit visible light photons. Now, quantum-foam wormholes come in at the Planck-Wheeler length, which is ten-to-minus-thirty-five metres. You’ve managed to expand them up through twenty orders of magnitude to make them big enough to pass gamma-ray photons. Very high frequency, very short wavelength.”

  “Yeah. We use the gamma rays to carry digitized data streams, which…”

  “But the wavelength of your gamma rays is around a million times smaller than visible-light wavelengths. The mouths of your second-generation wormholes would have to be around a micron across at least.” David eyed his father. “I take it you’ve had your engineers trying to achieve exactly that. And it doesn’t work.”

  Hiram sighed. “We’ve actually managed to pump in enough Casimir energy to rip open wormholes that wide. But you get some kind of feedback effect which causes the damn things to collapse.”

  David nodded. “They call it Wheeler instability. Wormholes aren’t naturally stable. A wormhole mouth’s gravity pulls in photons, accelerates them to high energy, and that energized radiation bombards the throat and causes it to pinch off. It’s the effect you have to counter with Casimir-effect negative energy, to keep open even the smallest wormholes.”

  Hiram walked to the window of the little cafeteria. Beyond, David could see the hulking form of the detector complex at the heart of the facility. “I have some good minds here. But these people are experimentalists. All they can do is trap and measure what happens when it all goes wrong. What we need is to beef up the theory, to go beyond the state of the art. Which is where you come in.” He turned. “David, I want you to take a sabbatical from Oxford and come work with me on this.” Hiram put his arm around David’s shoulders; his flesh was strong and warm, its pressure overpowering. “Think of how this could turn out. Maybe you’ll pick up the Nobel Prize in Physics, while simultaneously I’ll eat up ENO and those other yapping dogs who run at my heels. Father and son together. Sons. What do you think?”

  David was aware of Bobby’s eyes on him. “I guess -”

  Hiram clapped his hands together. “I knew you’d say yes.”

  “I haven’t, yet.”

  “Okay, okay. But you will. I sense it. You know, it’s just terrific when long-term plans pay off.”

  David felt cold. “What long-term plans?”

  Talking fast and eagerly, Hiram said, “If you were going to work in physics, I was keen for you to stay in Europe. I researched the field. You majored in mathematics — correct? Then you took your doctorate in a department of applied math and theoretical physics.”

  “At Cambridge, yes. Hawking’s department -”

  “That’s a typical European route. As a result you’re well versed in up-to-date math. It’s a difference of culture, Americans have led the world in practical physics, but they use math that dates back to World War Two. So if you’re looking for a theoretical breakthrough, don’t ask anyone trained in America.”

  “And here I am,” said David coldly. “With my convenient European education.”

  Bobby said slowly, “Dad, are you telling us you arranged things so that David got a European physics education, just on the off chance that he’d be useful to you? And all without his knowledge?”

  Hiram stood straight. “Not just useful to me. More useful to himself. More useful to the world. More liable to achieve success.” He looked from one to the other of his sons, and placed his hands on their heads, as if blessing them. “Everything I’ve done has been in your best interest. Don’t you see that yet?”

  David looked into Bobby’s eyes. Bobby’s gaze slid away, his expression unreadable.

  Chapter 4

  Wormwood

  Extracted from “Wormwood: When Mountains Melt,” by Katherine Manzoni, published by Shiva Press, New York, 2033; also available as Internet floater dataset:

  …We face great challenges as a species if we are to survive the next few centuries. It has become clear that the effects of climate change will be much worse than imagined a few decades ago: indeed, predictions of those effects from, say, the 1980s now look foolishly optimistic. We know now that the rapid warming of the last couple of centuries has caused a series of metastable natural systems around the planet to flip to new states. From beneath the thawing permafrost of Siberia, billions of tonnes of methane and other greenhouse gases are already being released. Warming ocean waters are destabilizing more huge methane reservoirs around the continental shelves. Northern Europe is entering a period of extreme cold because of the shutdown of the Gulf Stream. New atmospheric modes — permanent storms — seem to be emerging over the oceans and the great landmasses. The death of the tropical forests is dumping vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The slow melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet seems to be releasing pressure on an archipelago of sunken islands beneath, and volcanic activity is likely, which will in turn lead to a catastrophic additional melting of the sheet. The rise in sea levels is now forecast to be much higher than was imagined a few decades ago. And so on. All of these changes are interlinked. It may be that the spell of climatic stability which the Earth has enjoyed for thousands of years — a stability which allowed human civilization to emerge in the first place — is now coming to an end, perhaps because of our own actions. The worst case is that we are heading for some irreversible climatic breakdown, for example a runaway greenhouse, which would kill us all. But all these problems pale in comparison to what will befall us if the body now known as the Wormwood should impact the Earth — although it is a chill coincidence that the Russian for “Wormwood” is “Chernobyl”…

  •

  Much of the speculation about the Wormwood and its likely consequence has been sadly misinformed — indeed, complacent. Let me reiterate some basic facts here.

  Fact: the Wormwood is not an asteroid.

  The astronomers think the Wormwood might once have been a moon of Neptune or Uranus, or perhaps it was locked in a stable point in Neptune’s orbit, and was then perturbed somehow. But perturbed it was, and now it is on a five-hundred-year collision course with Earth.

  Fact: the Wormwood’s impact will not be comparable to the Chicxulub impact which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

  That impact was sufficient to cause mass death, and to alter — drastically, and for all time — the course of evolution of life on Earth. But it was caused by an impactor some ten kilometres across. The Wormwood is forty times as large, and its mass is therefore some sixty thousand times as great.

  Fact: the Wormwood will not simply cause a mass extinction event, like Chicxulub It will be much worse than that.

  The heat pulse will sterilize the land to a depth of fifty metres. Life might survive, but only by being buried deep in caves. We know no way, even in principle, by which a human community could ride out the impact. It may be that viable populations could be established on other worlds: in orbit, on Mars or the Moon. But even in five centuries only a small fraction of the world’s current population could be sheltered off-world.

  Thus, Earth cannot be evacuated. When the Wormwood arrives, almost everybody will die.

  Fact: the Wormwood cannot be deflected with foreseeable technology.

  It is possible we could turn aside sm
all bodies — a few kilometres across, typical of the population of near-Earth asteroids — with such means as emplaced nuclear charges or thermonuclear rockets. The challenge of deflecting the Wormwood is many orders of magnitude greater. Thought experiments on moving such bodies have proposed, for example, using a series of gravitational assists — not available in this case — or using advanced technology such as nanotech von Neumann machines to dismantle and disperse the body. But such technologies are far beyond our current capabilities.

  Two years after I exposed the conspiracy to conceal from the general public the existence of the Wormwood, attention is already moving on and we have yet to start work on the great project of our survival.

  Indeed, the Wormwood itself is already having advance effects. It is a cruel irony that just as, for the first time in our history, we were beginning to manage our future responsibly and jointly, the prospect of Wormwood Day seems to render such efforts meaningless. Already we’ve seen the abandonment of various voluntary waste-emission guidelines, the closure of nature reserves, an upgraded search for sources of non-renewable fuels, an extinction pulse among endangered species. If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel, we may as well bum the furniture today.

  None of our problems are insoluble, not even the Wormwood. But it seems clear that to prevail we humans will have to act with a smartness and selflessness that has so far eluded us during our long and tangled history.

  Still, my hope centres on humanity and ingenuity. It is significant, I believe, that the Wormwood was discovered not by the professionals, who weren’t looking that way, but by a network of amateur sky watchers, who set up robot telescopes in their backyards, and used shareware routines to scan optical detector images for changing glimmers of light, and refused to accept the cloak of secrecy our government tried to lay over them. It is in groups like this — earnest, intelligent, cooperative, stubborn, refusing to submit to impulses toward suicide or hedonism or selfishness, seeking new solutions to challenge the complacency of the professionals — that our best and brightest hope of surviving the future may lie…