A Grey Moon Over China (4 page)

I sawed through the cable leading from the dish into the underbrush. It was a small commercial device and nothing military, so we were probably dealing with civilian recluses or sportsmen. We were so close to the equator that the dish was pointed only slightly north, but it was pointing a fair bit east, probably at one of California’s big commercial machines. Someone was using it to listen to the radio and order his milk and eggs.

Elliot and Tanaka had headed straight into the trees, and I cut into the jungle to meet them. I was struck by how quiet it was. No birds or crickets, no scurrying among the trees. Only the snapping of twigs and the crackle of dry leaves under my feet. The jungle was thin and brittle, close to burning. And it stank; down at the waterline, rotting fish lay half out of the water.

“Okey-doke,” said Elliot beside me, “let’s walk real quiet, like.” We pushed in through the underbrush until a bungalow appeared through the trees. Beyond it a rutted track climbed up to the dirt road, after which the hillside continued up to the island’s ridge. The tangle of jungle
followed the slope up a way, then petered out into rock and shale. The door to the bungalow was open, and Elliot motioned me in.

I peered into the gloom. It was empty, stripped of furniture, covered with dust.

“I don’t think we’re going to find anyone,” I said when I came back. “This place is too crummy for air-dropped supplies, and there’s not much of a town or boat dock anywhere close.”

“Yeah. Maybe we got us a long-time-gone nut case retreat or something.”

“Tyrone,” said Tanaka, “that was a pretty new McAllister dish on the beach.”

“Yeah, true. Okay, here’s another one.” Tanaka and I waited among the trees while Elliot pushed open the door.

“Nope.”

I took the third bungalow. Its door was open like the others. I stepped onto the porch to look, but it was too dark to see in. Yet from the doorway came the steady purring of ventilating fans, and a current of warm air with an odd, sweet smell in it. I held up a hand for Elliot and Tanaka to wait, then stepped in.

There was the luster of wooden floors and off to the side, a little up from the floor, tiny equipment lights. The familiar green lights of MI cabinets. On the wall behind them hung charts and drawings, while papers and books lay scattered on the tables. By the door stood a terminal with a cable hanging from it, most likely to the severed antenna on the beach.

At the far end of the room, a man sat on a straight chair turned slightly away from me, at a table with books and a glowing screen. Small and elderly, he had the dusty yellow skin and fine features of the Vietnamese. He wore a rumpled black shirt and a soiled shawl over his shoulders. Limp, grey strands of hair clung to his scalp.

A keyboard was pushed to one side, while instead he was using fast-typing gloves clamped to the table. The arms disappearing into them were thin, and the tendons stood out clearly even in the poor light. A worn blanket hung across his legs, pulled up around his waist, while a bamboo cane hung from the back of his chair. He looked fragile, barely alive. A smoking pipe lay next to the screen, made from bone and brass. Tinny Asian pop music came from the back room.

He was leaning forward with a kind of stiff intensity, the gloves shaking so hard that he had to be working very fast, although several times he gave an abrupt sigh and glanced toward the back.

I knocked.

His head whipped around, and in the same movement he seemed almost to lunge toward the screen. But his hands were caught in the gloves, and after
that one, convulsive movement he remained frozen in that odd position, his eyes locked on mine. There was something he didn’t want me to see, and from the expression that finally came over him after sitting there trapped by his own gloves for a minute, he knew that he himself had given this away. Had it really been that long since anyone had come to his door, since anyone had driven down this road, walked up this beach? His eyes finally lost focus and drifted to the floor. The tension went out of his shoulders and he slumped back into his chair, seemingly defeated by the mere appearance of an American soldier at his door. It was a strange performance in every way.

Elliot put a hand on my shoulder.

“We gotta go, Torres.” He squinted into the room, then craned his neck further into the shadows. “The fuck?” He took another step in and looked around, then stepped back to the door in confusion.

“You’re shitting me,” he said at last. “That’s him, ain’t it? The one we’re supposed to be rounding up? I thought this was all bullshit.”

But I’d already seen the titles on the books.

“It’s not biologicals, Tyrone.”

He hesitated, toying with the flap on his holster. “Listen, Torres,” he said finally. “Battalion’s screaming for my ass. We gotta do this and get out.”

“Go away, Tyrone.”

He stared at me. “Come on, Torres, get his ass out of here. What do you mean, ‘go away?’ You know this place is getting trashed tomorrow.”

“I’ll take care of it, Tyrone. I’ll get out with Polaski.”

Elliot ran the back of his hand across his mouth, looked uncertainly out through the open door, stared around the room one more time, then frowned at me as though he didn’t recognize me.

“Fine, Torres, fine. I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, but fine, I ain’t been here. But you watch yourself, boy.”

Then he was gone, and a minute later the helicopter pounded away overhead. Inside the bungalow, the man still hadn’t moved.

I walked along the tables and glanced again at the books. They were English-language texts in disciplines I scarcely understood, but whose significance I knew very well.

None of the machines along the near side of the room, idling in their racks or cluttered on top of the tables, appeared to be connected to the outside world, or to the machine the man had in front of him.

Next to the charts on the wall he’d pinned a clump of photographs and articles. He was in some of the photographs himself, standing next to Westerners in what looked like academic settings. One photograph of him alone was partway down an article entitled DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY DISMISSES SCIENTIST’S CLAIMS OF CHEAP POWER.

I looked at the title for several minutes. I scarcely wanted to think what it implied. If the man had really found such a thing, it was worth any amount of money—yet according to the article, he hadn’t. So why had he clipped it and saved it?

I read the rest of the articles, keeping one eye on the man all the while. And as I read them, a mixture of anticipation and fear began to leave a sour taste in my mouth. Could it really be that no one had ever put all the pieces together?

On the other hand, maybe someone had. The military. Maybe their story about the missing researcher wasn’t all fabrication. Maybe the military had indeed put the pieces together, and had gotten to the man first. Then killed the story, courtesy of the Department of Energy.

And if it was true, and he’d then gotten away from them, even to this strange, scarcely settled island cleverly in the shadow of the equatorial Pacific war zone itself, he wouldn’t really have been surprised to find the Army at his door.

Me.

Which makes it easier.
I walked around behind his chair to the back room, and he turned his head to follow. What was I going to do, though?

Or did I already know?

“Who’s here with you?” I said. He continued to watch me, but didn’t answer.

The back room was smaller, with its own door to the outside, half open. On the floor were a sleeping mat and some personal items, including a battered radio playing the music and some faded girls’ clothing.

I walked back to the table and leaned down to look at his screen. His eyes left mine to watch as I pulled the keyboard toward me, and his mouth opened with a hoarse sound of protest. His breath was strong with the half-sweet smell of opium.

On the screen were mathematical series that meant little to me, so I reached for a key to flip through the pages of the document he was working on, finding the operating system and the editor he was using unfamiliar. I glanced at the corner of the screen to try and find a page count, then stopped when I saw something else.

Next to the page count was the machine’s free memory count. But what should have been a few hundred billion—a few hundred gigabytes, maybe terabytes—was instead shown exponentially in a way I’d never seen before. 1.97 × 10
¹⁵
. Two times ten to the fifteenth.

Not hundreds of billions. Not trillions. Two
quadrillion
—a thousand times the memory of any workstation I’d ever worked on. And I’d worked on the best. The man’s eyes met mine.

Without touching the keyboard I walked to the back of the table, around to the computer cabinet itself. To one side of it, a twenty-centimeter section of the power cord had been stripped of its insulation, and the three copper conductors inside it carefully strung between two small pedestals in plain view on the table, as though between tiny telephone poles. Other than that there were only old-fashioned, transparent fibers leading to the gloves and keyboard and screen, also in plain view—no wireless antennas—and nothing else. Nothing. Everything the man had was inside that one machine. He might have been mirroring his data among multiple memory stores inside the box to keep it safe, but it wasn’t leaving the machine. He had surrounded his computer with an air-gap and shielding, lest anyone hack his way in, intercept its signals, or add a tracer wire when he wasn’t there.

I unfastened the clips and drew off the heavily shielded cover. The man said something and pulled himself out of his chair, but then slumped back down, quickly out of breath.

In the center of the machine were two oblong, dull silver shapes side by side, about six inches long and two wide. They bore Department of Defense asset tags. I’d heard rumors about such blocks, but I’d never seen any. They were petabyte memory blocks, one quadrillion bytes each, two to the fiftieth power, all of it static, immune to accidental loss. The document the man was writing couldn’t have needed a fraction of that memory, but whatever he was writing about must have. It was an amount of memory used to solve the mysterious equations of chaos, or to simulate the interactions of genetics or particle physics. The blocks would have cost millions each.

Blood was pounding in my ears as I walked back to the screen and began scrolling through the pages. Many of them seemed to deal with the rotation of super-symmetrical particles, the eerie fringe of quantum physics that had caught my attention in the book titles.

Somewhat more familiar engineering work followed. One page was titled SUMMARY DATA: OUTPUT IMPEDANCE. It dealt with the production of electrical power, and the numbers were very low. He was dealing with something that put out a tremendous amount of power, like a power plant generator.

Much farther down, a section was titled CRITICAL THERMAL THRESHOLDS AND WORKABLE MASS, and there, once I understood it, I stopped. It wasn’t a generator at all, but something that weighed only a few kilograms. The size of a car battery. It had to be some kind of pulsing device, then, because anything so small could only put out that kind of power for a few thousandths of a second.

The man was staring into his screen now along with me, at the same time tamping down his pipe absently with a finger.

The last page was titled OBSERVED SUSTAINABILITY, and had only a few sentences. But I stared at the words in those sentences for a long time. Over and over I looked at them, not believing.

Decades.
Not thousandths of a second, but
de cades
.

The man was looking directly at me now, his face an awful conflict of what I took to be both pride and pain.

I walked away, reeling. A device like the one spelled out in those blocks would give the world the kind of power people were literally dying for. Was it really possible?

“Observed,” it said. Not theoretical. Observed. A virtual observation in the blocks? Still, it would have been enough.

Power—and with it, freedom.

I
was standing next to the computer’s cabinet when I looked up again sometime later, facing the man across the table. The evening had left the room gloomy and dim, his face lit only by the screen. He’d lit his pipe when I’d first walked away, and his head was wreathed now in amber smoke that drifted through the glow between us, obscuring his features.

How long had I been pacing? Back and forth I’d gone past the clippings on the wall, past the now-darkened doorway, past the smoke and the keyboard, one eye always on the man and his hands, on the computer laid bare, on the silver blocks lying exposed in its middle like a beating double heart in an open chest. How many times had I remembered my father’s hands clutching his chipped and dirty glass, and how many times had I imagined, as on every other day of my life, an engine of bone-crushing power hurling me upward and away from it all? How many times had I wondered where this invention had really come from, only to tell myself that it surely wasn’t from this one, wretched man, that he himself, hidden away here with whatever guilty secret it was, could not possibly have had any intention of sharing it with the rest of a world so desperately in need.

My hand rested on one of the blocks. I ran my thumb down one side of it and my fingers down the other, feeling for the flange on the bottom.
Don’t.
There was a throbbing in my ears, a roaring sound.
Don’t speak.
The man sat in his smoky world of half-light and watched my hand. The block slid upward in its socket.