Gregory Benford - Timescape

PETERSON AWOKE AND LOOKED OUT OF THE WINDOW. The pilot had looped around to come in to San Diego from the ocean side. From this height most of the coastline north to Los Angeles was visible. That city was cloaked in its permanent haze; otherwise the day was clear and bright. The sun sparked flashes of brilliance from the windows of high-rise office blocks. Peterson stared vacantly at the sea. Tiny puckered lines of waves crawled imperceptibly toward the shore. Here and there, as the plane swung lower, he could see curves of white froth against the blue, vastly different from the ocean he had flown over the day before.

He had taken a commercial flight. From the air, the diatom bloom on the Atlantic had been horribly visible. It now extended over a hundred-kilometer diameter. Bloom was a good word for it, he thought wryly. It had looked like some giant flower, a scarlet camellia blossoming far off the shores of Brazil. His fellow passengers had been excited by the vision, stampeding from window to window to get a better view, asking agitated questions. Interesting, he observed, how red, the color of blood, spelled danger to the human mind. It had been eerie to look down and see that still, wounded ocean, the fringe of pink surf.

His mind had distanced itself from the reality below, turning it into a surrealistic work of art. Add purple jaguars and yellow trees: a Jesse Allen. And orange fishes in the air above…

How did that Bottomley poem go? The second stanza—something about forcing the birds to wing too high—where your unnatural vapors creep; Surely the living rocks shall die when birds no rightful distance keep . Nineteenth-century doggerel. How one clutched at the shreds of civilization.

There had been rioting in Rio. Standard political stuff, pop Marxism and local gripes touched off by the bloom. A waiting helicopter had whisked him from the airport to a secret rendezvous on a large yacht, anchored offshore north of the city. The Brazilian President was there, with his Cabinet. McKerrow from Washington, and Jean-Claude Rollet, a colleague of Peterson’s on the Council. They had conferred from 10 a.m. until late afternoon, having lunch brought in to them. Measures would be taken to contain the bloom, if possible. The crucial thing was to reverse the process; experiments were being conducted in the Indian Ocean and in control tanks in Southern California. Some emergency supplies were voted to Brazil, to compensate for the disruption in fishing. The Brazilian President was to play down the significance of this, avoid wholesale panic. Fingers-in-the-dike, fragile buttresses against the weight of the sickened sea around them, and so on. When they disbanded, Rollet had gone to report directly to the Council.

Peterson had had to step lively to avoid getting loaded up with errand-running, interference-blocking, and other jobs. Lubricating a crisis like this one took a lot of skillful footwork. There were the individual nations to soothe, England’s own interests to look out for (though that was not his prime official task), and of course the ever-present snout of the media pig. Peterson had argued successfully that someone needed to give an official beady eye to the California experiments. One had not only to do the right thing, one must above all be seen doing it. This got him the time he needed. His true purpose was a little experiment he’d thought of himself.

Straightaway after touchdown canned music came on and chaps began hauling out their carry-ons for the rush. Peterson found this the worst part of commercial travel and wished again he had pressed Sir Martin for authority to have his own executive jet on this trip. They were expensive, wasteful, etc. etc., but a bloody sight better than going in a cattle-car with wings. The standard argument, that private transport let one rest and thus saved the valuable executive’s energies, hadn’t held up well in the era of dwindling budgets.

He left the plane before anyone else, through the forward door, as per plan. There was a gratifyingly large security guard, decked out in leather boots and helmet. By now he was used to the openly worn automatic pistols.

His limo contained a protocol officer who babbled on to no consequence, but Peterson turned him off early on and enjoyed the ride. The security car behind stayed quite close, he noted. There seemed no sign of the recent “unpleasantness.” A few burned-out blocks of buildings, to be sure, and a freeway underpass on Route 405 pocked by heavy-caliber fire, but no air of lingering tension. The streets were fairly clear and the freeway was virtually deserted. Since the Mexican fields had petered out far ahead of notoriously optimistic schedules, California had ceased to be an automobile-worshiping paradise. That, plus the political pressure from the Mexicans to make good the highflown promises of economic uplift, had mixed in with the rest of the political brew here and led to the “unrest.”

The usual ceremonies sopped up minimal time. The Scripps Institute of Oceanography had a weathered but solid look to it, blue tiles and salty smell and all that. The staff were by now used to dignitaries trotting through. The TV johnnies got their footage—only it wasn’t called that anymore, Peterson, reminded himself, the mysterious term “dexers” having materialized in its place—and were duly ushered away. Peterson smiled, shook hands, made bland small talk. The package Markham had asked for from Caltech appeared and Peterson tucked it into his carrying case. Markham had requested this material, said it related to the tachyon business, and Peterson had agreed to use his good offices to extract it from the Americans. The work wasn’t publishable yet, a familiar ruse to avoid giving away anything, but a bit of footwork had got round that one.

The morning went by as planned. A general survey by an oceanographer, slides and viewgraphs before an audience of twenty. Then a reprise, more frank and far more pessimistic, with an audience of five. Then Alex Kiefer, head of the thing, in private.

“Don’t you want to take your coat off? It’s pretty warm today. Great day, in fact.” Kiefer spoke fast, almost nervously, and blinked as he spoke. Free of the mob now, Kiefer seemed to have an excess of energy. He walked quickly, bouncing forward on his toes, and looked around him constantly, jerkily saluting the few people they passed. He ushered Peterson into his office.

“Come in, come in,” he said, rubbing his hands. “Take a seat. Let me take your jacket. No? Yes, beautiful view, isn’t it? Beautiful.”

This latter was in response to a comment Peterson had not in fact made, although he had automatically crossed to the large corner windows, drawn by the shimmering expanse of the Pacific below. “Yes,” he said now, making the expected remark. “It’s a magnificent view. Doesn’t it distract you?”

The wide sandy beach stretched toward La Jolla and then curved out, broken up by rocks and coves, to a promontory surrounded by paradise palms. Out on the ocean, lines of surfers in wet suits sat bobbing patiently on their boards like large black sea birds.

Kiefer laughed. “If I find I can’t concentrate, I just put on a wet suit and go out and swim. Clears the mind. I try to swim every day. Matter of fact, hardly need a wet suit these days. Water’s already pretty warm. Those youngsters out there think it’s cold.” He indicated the surfers, most of whom were now on their knees, paddling before a good-sized wave. “In the old days it used to get real cold. Before they put those multi-gigawatt nuclear plants at San Onofre, y’know. Well, I’m sure you know. That kind of thing is your business, isn’t it? Anyway, it’s raised the water temperature slightly, just along this section of the coast. Interesting. So far it seems to have stimulated aquatic life. We’re watching it carefully here, of course. In fact, it’s one of our chief studies. If it gets higher, it could alter some cycles, but as far as we know, it’s peaked. There’s been no increase for several years now.”