Timescape

CHAPTER THIRTY

HE BANGED THE OUTER OFFICE DOOR SHUT AND thumped across the old broad-boarded flooring. He had a respectably ancient office, just off Naval Row, but at times he would just as soon have had less oiled wood and more modern air-conditioning. Ian Peterson, returning from a morning-long meeting, dumped a file of papers on his desk. His sinuses had a stuffed, cottony feel. Meetings invariably did that. He had felt a thin haze descend on his mind as the meeting progressed, sealing him off from much of the tedious detail and bickering. He knew the effect from years of experience; fatigue at so much talk, so many qualified phrases, so many experts covering their asses with carefully impersonal judgments.

He shook off the mood and thumbed into his desktop Sek. First, a list of incoming calls, arranged by priority. Peterson had carefully sorted out names into lists, so the answering Sek computer would know whether to alert him. The list changed weekly, as he moved from problem to problem. People who had once worked with him on a project had an annoying tendency to assume that they could then ring him up about continuing secondary issues, even months or years later.

Second, incoming memos, flagged with deadlines for reply.

Third, personal messages. Nothing there this time except a note from Sarah about her bloody party.

Fourth, news items of interest, broken down into abstracts. Last, minor unclassifiable items. No time for that today. He reviewed category One.

Hanschman, probably wailing about the metals problem. Peterson deflected that one to an assistant by typing in a three-letter symbol. Ellehlouh, the North African, with a last-gasp plea for more fly-ins to the new drought region. That he routed up to Opuktu. He was the officer in charge of selecting who got the grain and molasses shipments; let him take the flak. Call from that Kiefer in La Jolla, flagged urgent. Peterson picked up his telephone and punched through. Busy. He stabbed Repeat Call and said “Dr. Keifer” so the tape could add it to the “Mr. Peterson of the World Council is urgently trying to reach” message which now would try Kiefer’s number every twenty seconds.

Peterson turned to the memos and brightened. He punched for a screening of his own memo, dictated while riding to work this morning and machine-typed. He had never tried the system before.

deployed system is in the Gulf Stream hope I’ve got those capitalizations right off the Atlantic coast of Miami period yes. There is a four not oh special spelling button. I suppose k-n-o-t, there, a four knot current steady and reliable. Those currents rotate the giant turbine fans, producing enough electricity for all Florida. The turbines are admittedly huge, 500 meters in diameter. However, I would paraphrase the technical discussion as saying they are basically Victorian engineering. Large and simple. Their floating hull is 345 meters long and they hang fully 25 meters below the surface. That’s enough for passing ships to run safely over. The anchoring cables have to go down that’s t-w-o miles in some places. That is minor compared to the cables carrying power to land, but technical branch says that probably has no bad side effects either.

Our projections are that the nearest candidates—natural gas from seaweed and ocean thermal energy conversion—are hopelessly behind Coriolis. The name, as you undoubtedly know and I didn’t, springs from a French mathematician who had a hand in showing why ocean currents go as they do. Effects of the earth’s rotation and so on.

The snags are obvious. Having 400 of these slowing the Gulf Stream might be dicey. The weather pattern for much of the Atlantic Ocean hinges on that current, which sweeps by the US and Canada and then out to sea and back to the Caribbean is that the spelling must be. A full-scale numerical simulation on the omni all caps OMNI computer shows a measurable effect of one percent. Safe enough, by current guidelines.

Negative political impact is minimal. Introducing 40 gigawatts to that area will silence criticism of our halt to fishing, I should believe. I therefore advise prompt approvals. Yours sincerely et cetera.

Peterson grinned. Remarkable. They even assigned the most probable homonym. He corrected the piece and sent it off through the electronic labyrinth to Sir Martin. Committee flotsam and jetsam was for the assistants; Sir Martin saved his time for judgments, the delicate balancing act above the flood of information. He had taught Peterson a good deal, all the way down to such fine points as how to speak on a committee where your opponents are lying in wait. Sir Martin would pause and breathe in the middle of his sentences, then rush past the period at the end and on for a clause or two into the next sentence. No one knew when to make a smooth interruption.

Peterson asked his Sek for an update. He found the Kiefer call still facing the blank buzzing of a busy signal, and two underlings leaving recorded messages he would check later.

He reclined in his armchair and studied his office wall. Quite an array, yes. Pseudoparchment citations for bureaucratic excellence. Photos of himself beside various charismatic sloganeers with their buzzword bibles. Practitioners of leaderbiz, smiling at the camera.

The committee meeting this morning had its share of those, along with earnest biochemists and numerical meteorologists. Their reports on the distribution of the clouds were unsettling but vague. The clouds were further examples of “biological cross function,” an all-purpose term meaning interrelations nobody had thought of yet. Apparently the circumpolar wind vortex, which had shifted towards the equator in recent years, was picking up something from the region near the bloom. The unknown biological agents being carried by the clouds had caused withering of the Green Revolution crop strains. Besides giving uniform high yields, the Green Revolution plants also had uniform weaknesses. If one became diseased, they all did. How devastating the strange yellow-tan clouds might be was unknown. Something odd was in the biocycle, but research had not pieced together the puzzle as yet. The meeting had broken up into rivulets of indecision. Belgian biologists argued with plump disasterologists, neither with any hard evidence.

Peterson pondered what it might mean, while leafing through some reports. Inventories, assessments, speculative calculations, order-of-magnitude truths. Some were in the clunky gingerbread of Cyrillic, or the swoops of Arabic script, or Asia’s ant squiggles, or the squared-off machine type of ModEng. A tract on Erdwisenschaft made man a minor statistical nuisance, a bug skittering over a world reduced to nouns and numbers. Peterson was at times entranced by the mix of minds in the World Council, the encyclopedic power they tapped. Voices, a babble of voices. There was the furious energy of the Germans; the austere and finally constricting logic of la bella France; the Japanese, smothered now in industrial excess; strangely sad Americans, still strong but like an aging boxer, swinging at sparring partners no longer there; the Brazilians, wandering now onto the world stage, blinking into the spotlight, dazed. Several years ago he had gone on a tour of Ethiopia with a clucking band of international future-seers and watched their calculus collide with life. In dusty red-rocked gorges he had seen men attacking and scattering ant hills to snatch away the crumbs of wheat stored there. Naked women, colored like mud and with thin sacks for breasts, climbed mimosa trees to clip the green shoots of fresh growth, for soup. Children gathered stuff like briars, to chew for moisture. Trees were stripped bare of bark, gnawed at the roots. Skeletons baked white and luminous near brackish water holes.

The forecasting methodologists had paled and turned away.

When he was a boy he had watched the National Geographic programs on TV and come to think of the almost mythic beasts in Africa as distant friends, playing on the horizon of the world. Lions, vast and lazy. Giraffes, their stiff-necked lope taking them teetering into the distance. He’d had a boy’s dreamy love of them. Now they were nearly gone. He had learned a lesson there, in Africa. Soon there would be nothing bigger than a man on the planet that was not already a client, a housepet. Without the giants mankind would be alone with the rats and the cockroaches. Worse, perhaps, he would be alone with himself. This fuzzy issue had not occupied the futurologists. They cluckclucked over butter mountains here versus starvation there, and supplied their own recipes. They loved their theories more than the world. Forrester, rattling his numerical fantasies like beads; Heilbroner, urging mankind into a jail so they all could be sure of eating; Tinbergen, who thought one good crisis would shape us up; Kosolapov, whose Marxist optimism sat waiting patiently for the hacksaw of history to cut away capitalism, as though poverty were civilization’s headcold, not a disease; his opposites, the followers of Kahn, with cocky assurance that a few wars and some starving wouldn’t get in the way of higher per capita income; Schumacher’s disciple, with his shy faith that the hydrocarbon cartels would decide cottage industries were best after all; and Remuloto, the Third Industrial Revolutionist, seeing salvation in our starry satellites.

Peterson remembered with a smile that the US Department of the Interior had made a thorough prediction of trends in 1937, and had missed atomic energy, computers, radar, antibiotics, and World War II. Yet they all kept on, with this simple-minded linear extrapolation that was, despite a bank of computers to refine the numbers, still merely a new way to be stupid in an expensive fashion. And they were filled with recipes. Order up more fellow-feeling, y’see, and we’ll do better. To survive now Man had to be more patient, preferring long-range rational solutions to global problems, while suspending his nasty old irrational demands for short-range local fixes. They all wished some Lockeian dream of the future, a natural law which set forth human rights and human obligations simultaneously. An unwritten law, but reachable by reason. A mythology of stoic endurance would do the job, get us through the pinch. But who had one for sale? The secular faith in the technological fix had trickled away into astrology and worse. Jefferson’s descendants were sucking up whatever liberties they could and leaving for posterity a used-up garbage dump. Au revoir, Etats-Unis! Check your beclouded vision at the door. Peterson glanced at the one item on his wall that was out of place, a century-old sampler:

He laughed as the telephone rang. “Hello, Ian?” Kiefer’s voice was thin and reedy. “Happy to hear from you,” he said with artificial friendliness.

“I don’t think you’ll be so happy in a minute.”

“Oh?” Kiefer had not responded with the expected jovial banter that usually opened executive conversations.

“We’ve turned up the underlying process in that diatom bloom.”

“Good, then you can rectify it.”

“Eventually, yeah. Problem is, it’s a runaway. The process enters a phase where it can take the jacket of the plankton and change that material into the original pesticide-based molecules.”

Peterson sat very still and thought. “Like a religious movement,” he said to have something to say.

“Huh?”

“Turns heathen into apostles.”

“Well… yeah. Point is, that’s what makes it spread so fast. Never seen anything like it. It’s got a lot of the lab guys worried.”

“Can’t they find an… antidote?”

“In time, probably. Trouble is, we haven’t got much time. This is an exponential process.”

“How much time?”

“Months. Months to spread to the other oceans.”

“Christ.”

“Yeah. Look, I don’t know how much pull you’ve, got there, but I’d like this result taken right to the top.”

“I’ll do that, certainly.”

“Good. I’ve got a technical report on LogEx right now. I’ll transmit it on key, okay?”

“Right. Here, I’m receiving.”

“Good. Here it comes.”

It was Sir Martin who saw the connection. There was very little transfer of vapor from the ocean’s surface into cloud formation. But suppose the impurity in the bloom could convert the cellular jackets of living microorganisms into itself. Then a trivial amount of the stuff, given time, could spread through a cloud. Transport through the air was quick. Certainly it was much faster than through contact at the biological interface, at the working surface between the bloom and the living sea.

Peterson made his way into the twilight that prevailed inside the restaurant. Or at least it called itself a restaurant; all he could see was people sitting on the floor. Incense curled into his nostrils, making him want to sneeze.

“Ian! Over here!”

Laura’s voice came from somewhere to the left. He felt his way along until he could make her out, sitting on pillows and sucking something milky through a straw. Oriental music drifted through the room. He’d known as soon as he set out that it was a mistake to meet some girl he’d had it off with, simply because she was going through some sort of crisis. The California news and the stir it was causing in the Council had kept him pinned to his desk throughout the night. The technical types were hysterical. Some senior people wrote off that fact, on the grounds that the technical people had been fairly alarmed before, and were proved wrong. This time Peterson was not so sure that that easy logic made sense.

“Hello. I really would have preferred to meet you at my club. I mean, this is quite all right, but—”

“Oh no, Ian, I wanted to see you in a place I knew. Not some stuffy men’s club.”

“It’s really very pleasant, not stuffy at all. We can go round and have a light supper—”

“I wanted to show you where I’m working, though.”

“You work here?” He looked round incredulously.

“It’s my day off, of course. But it’s a job, and a blow for independence!”

“Oh. Independence.”

“Yes, it’s exactly what you told me to do. Remember? I’ve moved out on my parents. Quit Bowes & Bowes, and come to London. And got a job. Next week, I’ll start acting classes.”

“Oh. Oh, that’s very good.”

A waiter materialized out of the gloom. “Would you like to order, sir?”

“Ah, yes. Whisky. And some food, I suppose.”

“They have great curries.”

“Beef, then.”

“I am sorry, sir, we have no meat dishes.”

“No bloody meat?”

“This is a vegetarian restaurant, Ian. Really tasty. It’s fresh, brought in every day. Do try it.”

“Oh, Christ. A biryani, then. Egg.”

“Ian, I want to tell you all about my, my escape from my parents, and my plans. And I want your advice on getting into acting, I’m sure you know many, many people who know how to do it.”

“Not really. I’m in government, you know.”

“Oh, but you must, I’m sure you do. If you’ll just think a bit, I’m sure…” and as she rattled on Peterson saw he had indeed made a mistake. He had felt he needed a break from the tension at the Council center, and Laura’s telephoning had come at precisely the right moment to lure him. He had let the moment dominate his better judgment. Now he had to eat some dreadful meal in a restaurant kept dark because they didn’t want you to see the dirt, and into the bargain he had to be hustled by this shopgirl. Peterson grimaced, certain she wouldn’t see him in this light. Well, at least he was going to get a meal out of it; fuel for the work that was certain to come. And he did need a break from Sir Martin. “Do you have a place nearby?” he asked.

“Yes, in Banbury Road. A closet, nearly, I’m afraid.”

“I’m sure I won’t mind it.” He smiled in the darkness.