The Light of Other Days

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Now the countdown clock neared its conclusion. Once more the wall-mounted SoftScreen showed an inky darkness, broken only by random pixel flashes, and with the numeric monitor in the corner 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 flickering light playing on his face.

  David swivelled 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 the image stayed stable for two seconds, three, he deliberately sucked in air.

  Bobby asked, “What are we seeing?”

  “The wormhole mouth. Or rather, the light it’s pulling in from its surroundings, here, the Wormworks. Look, you can see the electronics stack. But the strong gravity of the mouth is dragging in light from the three-dimensional space all around it. The image is being distorted.”

  “Like gravitational lensing.”

  He looked at Bobby in surprise. “Exactly that.” He checked the monitors. “We’re already passing our previous best…”

  Now the distortion of the image became stronger, as the shapes of equipment and light fixtures were smeared to circles surrounding the view’s central point. Some of the colours seemed to be Doppler-shifting 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 experiments had collapsed.

  Now the disc image began to shrink as the light, falling from three dimensions onto the wormhole mouth, was compressed by the wormhole’s throat into a narrowing 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 magnifying lens, and when Hiram looked 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, miniature electromagnets. And, at the geometric centre 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 grey 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 the SoftScreen. “He’s saying something. His lips are moving.” He stood there, mouth moving in sympathy. “I… 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.

  Chapter 7

  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 and 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.”

  “Generally!”

  “Believe it or not.”

  “But this -” He waved a hand toward the hulking, mysterious machinery out in the dark. “ — isn’t even surveillance 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 complex person — or rather, she thought sadly, incomplete.

  His finger hovered over a start button on the SoftScreen. “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 Wormworks 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 Wormworks 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 detailed internal map of the building, complete with a grid of GPS references.

  Now, if all went well, those references would be sufficient 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 looking through a silvered tunnel. There was a sense of movemen
t, 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 atmospheric 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, casually pushed back. On the walls there were performance graphs and bar charts, what looked like accounting statements.

  There was luxury here. The wallpaper looked like handmade English stuff, probably the most expensive in the 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 labelled CONVERTS: human 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. Welcome to the goldfish bowl…”

  Bobby worked his SoftScreen, making the reconstructed image pan around. “I thought rhinos were extinct.”

  “They are now. Billybob was involved in a consortium which bought out the last breeding pair from a private 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 restoring 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. I can magnify and enhance selectively.”

  “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 metres 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 besides they hadn’t been laid out for convenient reading; some of them were lying face down or were obscured by others. Still, Bobby was able to pick out sections — he inverted the images and corrected for perspective distortion, cleaned them up with intelligent-software enhancement routines — enough for Kate to get a sense of what much of the material was about.

  It was mostly routine corporate stuff — chilling evidence 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 contain 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 engineers. Look, Kate, it’s three-thirty in the morning. Let’s be patient. I have security lockout 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 journo 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 cavernous gloom of the Wormworks, but his touch was warm, dry, confident. “You don’t have to worry. Just think of it. Right now nobody else on the planet, nobody, has access to WormCam technology. There’s no way Billybob 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.

  She reached up, covered his hand, and kissed it. “You’re right. We have to wait. But I’m burning energy anyhow. So let’s do something constructive with it.”

  He seemed to hesitate, as if trying to puzzle out her meaning.

  Well, Kate, she told herself, you aren’t like the other girls he’s met in his gilded life. Maybe he needs a little help.

  She put her free hand around his neck, pulled him toward her, and felt his mouth on hers. Her tongue, hot and inquisitive, pushed into his mouth, and ran along a ridge of perfect lower teeth; his lips responded eagerly.

  At first he was tender, even loving. But, as passion built, she became aware of a change in his posture, his manner. As she responded to his unspoken commands she was aware that she was letting him take control, and — even as he brought her to a deep climax with expert ease — she felt he was distracted, lost in the mysteries of his own strange, wounded mind, engaged with the physical act, and not with her.

  He knows how to make love, she thought, maybe better than anybody I know. But he doesn’t know how to love. What a cliché that was. But it was true. And terribly sad.

  And, even as his body closed on hers, her fingers, digging into the hair at the back of his neck, found something round and hard under his covering of hair, about the size of a nickel, metallic and cold.

  It was a brain stud.

  •

  In the spring morning silence of the Wormworks, David sat in the glow of his SoftScreen.

  He was looking down at the top of his own head, from a height of two or three metres. It wasn’t a comfortable sight: he looked overweight, and there was a small bald spot at his crown he hadn’t noticed before, a little pink coin in among his uncombed mass of hair.

  He raised his hand to find the bald spot.

  The image in the ’Screen raised its hand too, like a puppet slaved to his actions. He waved, childishly, and looked up. But of course there was nothing to see, no sign of the tiny rip on spacetime which transmitted these images.

  He tapped at the ’Screen, and the viewpoint swivelled, looking straight ahead. Another tap, hesitantly, and it began to move forward, through the Wormworks’ dark halls: at first a little jerkily, then more smoothly. Huge machines, looming and rather sinister, floated past him like blocky clouds.

  Eventually, he supposed, commercial versions of this wormhole camera would come with more intuitive controls, a joystick perhaps, levers and knobs to swivel the viewpoint this way and that. But this simple configuration of touch controls on his ’Screen was enough to let him control the viewpoint, allowing him to concentrat
e on the image itself.

  And of course, a corner of his mind reminded him, in actuality the viewpoint wasn’t moving at all: rather, the Casimir engines were creating and collapsing a series of wormholes, Planck lengths apart, strung out in a line the way he wanted to move. The images returned by successive holes arrived sufficiently closely to give him the illusion of movement.

  But none of that was important for now, he told himself sternly. For now he only wanted to play.

  With a determined slap at the ’Screen he turned the viewpoint and made it fly straight at the Wormworks’ corrugated iron wall. He couldn’t help but wince as that barrier flew at him.

  There was an instant of darkness. And then he was through, and immersed suddenly in dazzling sunlight.

  He slowed the viewpoint and dropped it to around eye level. He was in the grounds which surrounded the Wormworks: grass, streams, cute little bridges. The sun was low, casting long crisp shadows, and there was a trace of dew that glimmered on the grass.

  He let his viewpoint glide forward, at first at walking pace, then a little faster. The grass swept beneath him, and Hiram’s replanted trees blurred past, side by side.

  The sense of speed was exhilarating.

  He still hadn’t mastered the controls, and from time to time his viewpoint would plunge clumsily through a tree or a rock; moments of darkness, tinged deep brown or grey. But he was getting the hang of it, and the sense of speed and freedom and clarity was sinking. It was like being ten years old again, he thought, senses fresh and sharp, a body so full of energy he was light as a feather.

  He came to the plant’s drive. He raised the viewpoint through two or three metres, swept down the drive, and found the freeway. He flew higher and skimmed far above the road, gazing down at the streams of gleaming, beetle-like cars below. The traffic flow, still gathering for the rush hour to come, was dense and fast-moving. He could see patterns in the flow, knots of density that gathered and cleared as the invisible web of software controls optimized the stream of SmartDriven cars.