Arthur Clarke - The Light of Other Days

Hiram took his son straight to his research facility — the Wormworks, as he called it — out to the north of Seattle itself. The drive, in a SmartDrive Rolls, was fast and scary. Controlled by positioning satellites and intelligent in-car software, the vehicles flowed along the freeways at more than 150 kilometres an hour, mere centimetres between their bumpers; it was all much more aggressive than David was used to in Europe. But the city, what he saw of it, struck him as quite European, a place of fine, well-preserved houses with expansive views of hills and sea, the more modern developments integrated reasonably gracefully with the overall feel of the place. The downtown area seemed to be bustling, as the Christmas buying season descended once more.

He remembered little of the place but childhood fragments: the small boat Hiram used to run out of the Sound, trips above the snow line in winter. He’d been back to America many times before, of course; theoretical physics was an international discipline. But he’d never returned to Seattle — not since the day his mother had so memorably bundled him up and stormed out of Hiram’s home.

Hiram talked continually, peppering his son with questions.

“So you feel settled in England?”

“Well, you know about the climate problems. But even icebound, Oxford is a fine place to live. Especially since they abolished private cars inside the ring road, and.”

“Those stuck-up British toffs don’t pick on you for that French accent?”

“Father, I am French. That’s my identity.”

“But not your citizenship.” Hiram slapped his son’s thigh. “You’re an American. Don’t forget that.” He glanced at David more warily. “And are you still practising?”

David smiled. “You mean, am I still a Catholic? Yes, Father.”

Hiram grunted. “That bloody mother of yours. Biggest mistake I ever made was shackling myself to her without taking account of her religion. And now she’s passed the God virus on to you.”

David felt his nostrils flare. “Your language is offensive.”

“…Yes. I’m sorry. So, England is a good place to be a Catholic nowadays?”

“Since they disestablished the Church, England has acquired one of the healthiest Catholic communities in the world.”

Hiram grunted. “You don’t often hear the words ‘healthy’ and ‘Catholic’ in the same sentence… We’re here.”

They had reached a broad parking lot. The car pulled over. David climbed out after his father. They were close to the ocean here, and David was immediately immersed in chill, salt-laden air.

The lot fringed a large open building, crudely constructed of concrete and corrugated metal, like an aircraft hangar. There was a giant corrugated door at one end, partly open, and robot trucks were hauling cartons into the building from a stack outside.

Hiram led his son to a small, human-sized door cut in one wall; it was dwarfed by the scale of the structure. “Welcome to the centre of the universe.” Hiram looked abashed, suddenly. “Look, I dragged you out here without thinking. I know you’re just off your flight. If you need a break, a shower -”

Hiram seemed full of genuine concern for his welfare, and David couldn’t resist a smile. “Maybe coffee, a little later. Show me your new toy.”

The space within was cold, cavernous. As they walked across the dusty concrete floor their footsteps echoed. The roof was ribbed, and strip lights dangled everywhere, filling the vast volume with a cold, pervasive grey light. There was a sense of hush, of calm; David was reminded more of a cathedral than a technological facility.

At the centre of the building a stack of equipment towered above the handful of technicians working here. David was a theoretician, not an experimentalist, but he recognized the paraphernalia of a high-energy experimental rig. There were subatomic-particle detectors — arrays of crystal blocks stacked high and deep — and boxes of control electronics piled up like white bricks, dwarfed by the detector array itself, but each itself the size of a mobile home.

The technicians weren’t typical of a high-energy physics establishment, however. On average they seemed quite old — perhaps around sixty, given how hard it was to estimate ages these days.

He raised this with Hiram.

“Yeah. OurWorld makes the policy of hiring older workers anyhow. They’re conscientious, generally as smart as they ever were thanks to the brain chemicals they give us now, and grateful for a job. And in this case, most of the people here are victims of the SSC cancellation.”

“The SSC — the Superconducting Super Collider?” A multi-billion-dollar particle-accelerator project that would have been built under a cornfield in Texas, had it not been canned by Congress in the 1990s.

Hiram said, “A whole generation of American particle physicists was hit by that decision. They survived; they found jobs in industry and Wall Street and so forth. Most of them never got over their disappointment, however.”

“But the SSC would have been a mistake. The linear accelerator technology that came along a few years later was far more effective, and cheaper. And besides most fundamental results in particle physics since 2010 or so have come from studies of high-energy cosmological events.”

“It doesn’t matter. Not to these people. The SSC might have been a mistake. But it would have been their mistake. When I traced these guys and offered them a chance to come work in cutting-edge high-energy physics again they jumped at the chance.” He eyed his son. “You know, you’re a smart boy, David.”

“I’m not a boy.”

“You had the kind of education I could never even have dreamed of. But there’s a lot I could teach you even so. Like how to handle people.” He waved a hand at the technicians. “Look at these guys. They’re working for a promise: for dreams of their youth, aspiration, self-fulfilment. If you can find some way to tap into that, you can get people to work like pit ponies, and for pennies.”

David followed him, frowning.

They reached a guardrail, and one grey-haired technician — with a curt, somewhat awed nod at Hiram — handed them hard hats. David fitted his gingerly to his head.

David leaned over the rail. He could smell machine oil, insulation, cleaning solvents. From here he could see that the detector array actually extended some distance below the ground surface. At the centre of the pit was a tight knot of machinery, dark and unfamiliar. A puff of vapour, like wispy steam, billowed from the core of the machinery: cryogenics, perhaps. There was a whirr, somewhere above. David looked up to see a beam crane in action, a long steel beam that extended over the detector array, with a grabbing arm at the end.

Hiram murmured, “Most of this stuff is just detectors of one kind or another, so we can figure out what is going on — particularly when something goes wrong.” He pointed at the knot of machinery at the core of the array. “That is the business end. A cluster of superconducting magnets.”

“Hence the cryogenics.”

“Yes. We make our big electromagnetic fields in there, the fields we use to build our buckyball Casimir engines.” There was pride in his voice — justifiable, thought David. “This was the very site where we opened up that first wormhole, back in the spring. I’m getting a plaque put up, you know, one of those historic markers. Call me immodest. Now we’re using this place to push the technology further, as far and as fast as we can.”

David turned to Hiram. “Why have you brought me out here?”

“…Just the question I was going to ask.”

The third voice, utterly unexpected, clearly startled Hiram.

A figure stepped out of the shadows of the detector stack, and came to stand beside Hiram. For a moment David’s heart pumped, for it might have been Hiram’s twin — or his premature ghost. But at second glance David could detect differences; the second man was considerably younger, less bulky, perhaps a little taller, and his hair was still thick and glossy black.