The colonel’s plan had one more advantage. It meant they might soon reduce the number of pulses to just a nudge now and then.
He scuffed the ground. Inhaled the scented air. Shoved his hands into his jacket pockets. All right. Keeping it down there makes sense. Maybe. And yet Alex felt edgy.
Everywhere Beta passes, the minerals seem to change … at least momentarily.
It was hard to tell how, exactly, even with their wonderfully improved sensitivity. Beta was still a tiny, if ferocious object, with an actual physical zone of influence only millimeters across. The affected track of altered perovskites was consequently extremely thin. Still, with each orbit more slender tubes of transformed mineral glittered in the singularity’s wake, flickering oddly.
How can we leave the thing down there when we have no idea what the long-term effects will be?
Maybe it was a good thing he hadn’t told Hutton or Spivey about his new resonator, the one with the spherical, compact design. Better to wait and be certain what the colonel’s actual scheme was… what he was going to do when word inevitably leaked out.
For they weren’t going to be able to keep the lid on forever, that was clear to everyone. Spivey’s bosses had to be preparing for a political powwow soon.
Maybe all they want is to present the world with a fait accompli, Alex thought hopefully. “Look, see what we in the West have done? We saved the world! Now, of course, we’ll let the tribunals have the keys to the gazer. It’s far too dangerous for any one group to control.”
Alex smiled. Yes. Quite possibly that was exactly what they had in mind.
Right. Surely.
On his way back to the bungalow, Alex passed before a row of seaside moai sculptures, this strange island’s contribution to world imagery. Gloomy and almost identical, they nonetheless struck him differently each time he saw them. On this occasion, despite the wind and sparkling stars, they just looked like huge chunks of stone, pathetically chiseled by desperate folk to resemble stern gods. People did bizarre things when they were afraid… as most men and women had been for nearly all the time since the species evolved.
We didn’t make Beta though, Alex reminded himself. So we’re foolish, fearful, sometimes crazy, but maybe not damned.
Not yet, at least.
Back at the bungalow, Alex wiped his feet before entering.
“…know it’s logical, and maybe justified,” Teresa said, nodding seriously. “But after Jason… well. I can’t share again. I don’t think I could handle it.”
“But that was different—” June stopped and looked up quickly as Alex entered.
“Share what?” he asked. “What’s so different?”
Teresa looked away, but June stood up, smiling. She took him by the lapels and drew him into the room. “Nothing important. Just girl talk. Anyway, we decided to call it a night. I have a busy day tomorrow, so—”
“So I’ve got to go,” Teresa said, putting her glass aside. For some reason she wouldn’t meet Alex’s eyes now, which disturbed him. What’s going on? he wondered.
Teresa picked up the satchel June had brought along especially for her. Alex had assumed it contained tokens from Spivey, to signal all was forgiven. But Teresa acted as if it were something strictly between herself and the other woman, a peace offering of a different sort entirely. “Thanks for the stuff, June,” she said, lifting the case.
“No big deal. Just hardware store goods. What’re you going to do with all those catalysts and things?”
Teresa smiled enigmatically. “Oh, just a little tidying up, that’s all.”
“Mm,” June commented.
“Yeah. Mm. So.” Teresa shifted her feet. “Well. G’night you two.”
After a moment’s hesitation, the women kissed each other on the cheek. Teresa squeezed Alex’s shoulder, still without meeting his eyes, and went out into the night. He stood in the open doorway, watching her go.
From behind him, June’s arms slid under his and wrapped across his chest. She squeezed hard and let out a sigh. “Alex. Oh, Alex. What are we going to do with you?”
Puzzled, he turned around, letting the door close behind him. “What do you mean?”
“Oh…” She seemed about to say more, but finally shook her head. Taking his hand she said, “Come on, then. To bed. We both have busy days ahead.”
PART IX
PLANET
The Earth’s most permanent feature was the Pacific Ocean. Its shape might change with the passing eons, islands rising and falling as its plates collided, merged, and broke apart again. But the great basin remained.
Not so the Atlantic, which opened and closed many times. Slow heat built underneath a sequence of huge, granite supercontinents, splitting them asunder along bursting seams. Then, tens of millions of years later, the now cool center would sink again to halt the rivening and begin drawing the sleeves together again.
The cycle continued — breakup followed by remerging followed by breakup again. And this had important effects on the progress of life. Species that had roamed across broad ranges found themselves divided into subpopulations. Separated bands of cousins went their diverging genetic ways, adapting to new challenges, discovering diverse techniques for living. When the dispersed relations finally were reunited eons later by reconverging continents, these descendants of a common ancestor often could no longer interbreed. They met not as cousins, but as competitors.
As it happened, there came a later period when the vagaries of plate tectonics thrust up two huge mountain ranges — the Himalayas and the Rockies — which virtually
blocked the flow of low, moist air across the Northern Hemisphere. This had dramatic consequences on the weather, which in turn isolated still more species, driving them to adapt.
Ebbing, flowing. Inhaling, exhaling. The cycle kept driving changes, improvements.
Eventually, dim flickers of light began to glow on the planet’s night side, flickers in the dark that weren’t forest fires or lightning.
All this heating and cooling, stirring and recombining had finally brought about something completely new.
□ Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [□ SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546], Special Subforum 562: Crackpot-Iconoclast Social Theories.
All this panic about how the Han are engaged in “economic conquest of the globe” — such rubbish! True, their huge, surging economy poses a challenge, especially to the PAN and GEACS trade groups. Instead of endlessly debating the University of Winnipeg Neomanagement Model, China has actually instituted many of its revolutionary features. We can all learn a lesson, especially the Sovs and Canucks, who keep finding themselves underpriced in the manufacture of desal equipment and nanocrystals. The Han already have a corner on blazers and lap-ticks, not to mention consumer items like torque zenners. But talk of “economic conquest” [□ ref: A69802-111, 5/19/38 K-234-09-17826] or the Han “… buying up goddam everything…” [□ ref: A69802-111, 5/12/38 M-453-65-5545] completely ignores history.
Consider the 1950s and 1960s. The United States of America, which then included California and Hawaii, but not Luzon or Cuba, was the world’s economic powerhouse. A famous Euroleader named Servan-Schreiber wrote a book called The American Challenge, predicting America would soon “… own everything worth owning…”
Of course it didn’t happen. Having achieved success, U.S. citizens demanded payoff for all their hard work. Instead of buying the world, they bought things from the world. It became the greatest transfer of wealth in history — far surpassing all forms of foreign aid. The American purchasing dynamo lifted Europe and East Asia into the twenty-first century… until the bubble finally burst and Yanks had to learn to pay as you go, like normal people.
For a brief time in the nineteen-seventies, the first and second oil crises made it seem that the new planetary kingpins would be Arab sheiks. Then, in the eighties, Japan scared the hell out of everybody. (Look it up!) Through hard work (and by adroitly catering to America’s adolescent buying frenzy) the Japanese boot-strapped themselves to economic power that held the world in awe. Everyone predicted that soon they “would own everything.”
But each of us takes our turn, it seems, driving the world economy. A new generation of Japanese, wanting more from life than endless toil and a tiny apartment, went on a new buying spree. And in the early years of this century, wasn’t it Russia — with nearly half the world’s trained engineers and newly released from two thousand years of stifling czars and commissars — who were suddenly only too glad to work hard, build to order, and sell cheap whatever the Japanese wanted? Many of you probably remember the consequence a while later, when Russian was proposed to replace Simglish as the second lingua franca. But that passed too, didn’t it?
Come on, droogs. Learn to step back and take a long view. Time will come (if the planet holds out) when even the Han will get tired of laboring themselves sick, piling money in the bank with nothing to spend it on.
Then cafe to predict where the next group of hard workers will arise? My money’s on those puritan secessionists in New England. Now those are people who know how to give an employer a good hour’s work for an hour’s wage…