Timescape (14 page)

"Best make it on the way with Johnny. Can't you leave off for a weekend, though? I thought you had settled things yesterday."

"We worked out a message with Peterson. Ocean stuff, for the most part. We're letting pass the lot on mass fermentation of sugar cane for fuel."

"What's wrong with that? Burning alcohol is cleaner than that wretched petrol they're selling now."

Renfrew scrubbed his hands in the washbasin. "True enough. The snag is that the Brazilians cut back so much of their jungle for the sugar cane fields. That lowers the number of plants which can absorb carbon dioxide from the air. Trace that effect round a bit and it explains the shifts in the world climate, greenhouse effect and rainfall and so on."

"The Council decided that?"

"No, no, research teams worldwide did. The Council simply make policy to offset problems. The UN mandate, extraordinary powers, and all that."

"Your Mr. Peterson must be a very influential man."

Renfrew shrugged. "He says it's pure luck the United Kingdom has a strong voice. The only reason we do is that we've still got research teams working on highly visible problems. Otherwise, we'd have a seat appropriate to Nigeria or the Viet Union or some other swacking nobody."

"What you're doing is–what did you say, 'visible,' isn't it?"

Renfrew chuckled. "No, it's bloody transparent. Peterson's deflected some help my way, but he's doing it as sort of a personal lark, I'll wager."

"That's very nice of him."

"Nice?" Renfrew dried his hands, meditating. "He's interested intellectually, I can tell that, though he's no sort of intellectual in my book.

It's a fair trade, I'd say. He's getting some amusement from it, and I'm getting his pound notes."

"But he must think you'll succeed."

"Must he? Maybe. I'm not sure I do myself."

Marjorie seemed shocked. "Then why do it?"

"It's good physics. I don't know if we can alter the past. No one does.

Physics is in chaos about this thing. If there weren't a virtually complete shutdown of research, chaps would be swarming over the problem. I've got a chance here to do the definitive experiments. That's the reason. Science, luv."

Marjorie frowned at this but said nothing. Renfrew surveyed his handiwork. She began busily ranking jars on the shelves. Each had a rubber collar and metal sealing clamps. Inside swam vague blobs of vegetables. Renfrew found the sight distinctly un-appetizing. Marjorie abruptly turned from her work, her face knitted with concern, and said,

"You're deceiving him, aren't you?"

"Na, luv, I'm–what's the phrase?–keeping his expectations high."

"He expects–"

"Look, Peterson's interested in the problem. I'm not responsible for guessing his true motivations. Christ, you'll have him on the couch babbling about his early childhood next."

"I've never met the man," she said stiffly.

"Right, see, this conversation has no basis."

"It's you we're properly talking about. You–"

"Hold on. The thing you don't realize, Marj old lass, is that nobody really knows anything about these experiments. You can't accuse me of false adverts yet. And for that matter, Peterson seemed as concerned as I was with the interference we're getting, so maybe I misread him."

"Someone's interfering?"

"No, no, something is. A lot of incoming noise. I'll filter it out, though. I planned to work on that very point this afternoon."

Marjorie said firmly, "The mercury hunt."

She clicked on the radio, which blared to a jingle, "Your ho-ney is mo-ney, in the new job-sharing plan! That's right, a couple splitting one job can help the current–"

Renfrew switched it off. "Be good to get out of the house," he said pointedly.

He pedaled up to the Cav with Johnny. They passed farm buildings taken over by squatters and Renfrew grimaced to himself. He had gone round to several, trying to find the couple who had frightened Marjorie.

They'd given him a surly look and a rude off-wi'-ya. The constable was no help either.

As he passed the slumped walls of a barn Renfrew smelled the sour tang of coal smoke. Someone inside was burning the outlawed low-quality grade, but there was no bluish plume for the constable to trace. That was fairly typical. They'd spend good money on a device to suppress the visible emission, then quickly make up the cost in cheap fuel. Renfrew had heard otherwise respectable people bragging about doing precisely that, like children getting away with some delicious vice their parents had forbidden. They were the sort who threw their bottles and tins into great ruddy heaps down the woods, too, rather than trouble to recycle. He sometimes thought that the only people who obeyed the regs were the dwindling middle classes.

At the Cav, Johnny wandered the shadowy corridors while Renfrew picked up some notes. Johnny prevailed on him to take a quick ride up to the Institute for Astronomy, just across the Madingley Road. The boy had played there often and now that it was closed seldom saw it. There were big potholes in he Madingley where the tanks had come in to quell the riot in '96. Renfrew tipped into one and got a stain of mud on his trouser leg.

They pedaled by the long low office building of the Institute, with its outsized yawning windows, a once popular American style from an oil-rich era. They pumped up to the main building, a nineteenth-century pile of tan sandstone with its antiquated astronomical dome atop floors housing the library, offices, and the star chart bays. They glided by the little 36-incher dome on the way and then past the machine shop sheds, where the windows had been starred by the occasional passing sod. Their tires spat gravel as they wheeled up the long driveway. The bright white casements of the windows framed a black interior. Renfrew was turning in the circular drive to go back down the slope to Madingley when the big front doors lurched open. A short man peered out. He was wearing a formal suit with waistcoat and regimental tie, well knotted. He was sixtyish and studied them over bifocals. "You're not the constable," the man said in reedy surprise.

Renfrew, thinking this point obvious, stopped but said nothing. "Mr.

Frost!" Johnny cried. "Remember me?"

Frost frowned, then brightened. "Johnny, yes, haven't seen you for years. You came to our Observer's Night regular as the stars."

"Until you stopped giving them," the boy accused.

"The Institute closed," Frost said apologetically, bending over at the waist to bring his face to Johnny's level. "There was no money."

"You're still here."

"So I am. Our electricity is cut off, however, and you can't have the public in where they could fall in the dark."

Renfrew broke in with, "I'm John Renfrew, by the way–Johnny's dad."

"Yes. I thought you might be the constable. I sent word this morning,"

Frost said, pointing at a nearby window. The frame was smashed. "They simply kicked it in."

"They get anything?"

"A great lot. I tried to have those replaced, back when we put in the wire mesh on the corridor inside. I told them the library was an open invitation. But would they listen to me, the mere curator? No, silly, of course not."

"Did they take the telescope?" Johnny asked.

"No, that's worthless, very nearly. They nicked the books."

"Then I can still look through the telescope?"

"What books?" Renfrew could not imagine that academic references were of much value now.

"The collector's items, of course," Frost said with the proper pride of a curator. "Took a second edition Kepler, a second Copernicus, the original of the seventeenth-century astrometrical atlas–the lot, really. They were specialists, they were. Skipped the newer tomes. They also knew the fifth editions from the third, without taking them out of their protective sleeves. Not so easily done, when you're working in a dead hurry and with a pocket torch."

Renfrew was impressed, not the least because this was the first time he had ever heard anyone use the Word "tomes" in conversation. "Why were they in a hurry?"

"Because they knew I would return. I had gone out at dusk for my evening constitutional, to the war cemetery and back."

"You live here?"

"When the Institute closed I had nowhere to go." Frost drew himself up primly. "There are several of us. Old astronomers, mostly, turned out by their colleges. They live down the other building–it's warmer in winter.

These bricks hold the chill. I tell you, there was a time when the colleges cared for their old Fellows. When Boyle founded the Institute we had everything. Now it's into the dustbin with the lot, never mind the past, it's the current crisis that matters and–"

"I say, that's the constable coming there." Renfrew pointed, seizing on the distant figure on a bicycle to cut off the stream of academic lament.

He had heard much the same lines so often over the last few years that they had ceased to have any effect aside from boredom. The arrival of the constable, puffing and drawn, led Frost to produce the one volume the thieves hadn't made off with, a late edition Kepler. Renfrew studied the book for a moment while Frost went on to the constable, demanding a general alert to catch the thieves on the roads if possible. The pages were dry and brittle, crackling as Renfrew turned them. From long exposure to the new methods of making books he had forgotten how a line of type could raise an impression on the other side of the page, as if the press of history was behind each word. The heavily leaded letters were broad and the ink a deep black. The ample margins, the precise celestial drawings, the heft of the volume in his hands, all seemed to speak of a time when the making of books was a signpost in an assumed march forward, a pressure on the future.

The crowd of fathers had a holiday air, chattering and laughing. A few kicked a soccer ball on the gray cobblestones. This was a lark, an event to raise money for the hobbling city government of Cambridge. An official had read about such a search in American cities, and last month London had staged one.

Into the sewers they descended, bright electric torches spiking through the murk. Beneath the scientific laboratories and industrial sites of town the stonework passages were large enough for a man to walk upright.

Renfrew tugged the airmask tight against his face, smiling at Johnny through the transparent molded cup. Spring rains had swept clean; there was little stench. Their fellow hunters spilled past, buzzing with excitement.

Mercury was not exceedingly rare, commanding a thousand New Pounds per kilogram. In the gaudy mid-century times, commercial grade mercury had been poured down sinks and drains. It was cheaper then to throw out dirtied mercury and buy a fresh supply. The heaviest metal, it sought the lowest spots in the sewer system and pooled there. Even a liter recovered would justify the trouble.

They soon worked their way into the more narrow pipes, slipping away from the crowd. Their torches cast sparkling reflections from the wrinkled skin of the water caught in pools. "Hey, this way, Dad," Johnny called. The acoustics of the tunnels gave each word a hollow center. Renfrew turned and abruptly slipped. He spilled into the scum of a standing pond, cursing.

Johnny bent down. The torch's cone caught a seam of tarnished quicksilver. Renfrew's boot had snagged at a crack where two pipes butted unevenly. Mercury glowed as if alive beneath the filmed water. It gave off a warm, smudged glitter, a thin trapped snake worth a hundred guineas.

"A find! A find!" Johnny chanted. They sucked the metal into pressure bottles. Finding the luminous metal lifted their spirits; Renfrew laughed with gusty good humor. They walked on, discovering unexplored caves and dark secrets in the warrens, fanning the curving walls with yellow beams.

Johnny discovered a high niche, scooped out and furnished with a moldy mattress. "Home of some layabout, I expect," Renfrew murmured. They found candle stubs and frayed paperbacks. "Hey, this one's from 1968, Dad," Johnny said. It looked pornographic to Renfrew; he tossed it face down on the mattress. "Should be getting back," he said.

They found an iron ladder, using the map provided. Johnny wriggled out, blinking in the late afternoon sunlight. They queued up to turn in their pint of the silvery stuff to the Hunt Facilitator. In line with current theory, Renfrew noted, social groupings were now facilitated, not led.

Renfrew stood and watched Johnny talk and scuffle and go through the tentative approaching rituals with two other boys nearby in line. Already Johnny was getting beyond the age when parents deeply influenced him.

From now on it was peer pressure and the universals: swacking the ball about in the approved manner; showing proper disdain for girls; establishing one's buffer state role between the natural bullies and the naturally bullied; faking a certain coarse but necessarily vague familiarity with sex and the workings of those mysterious gummy organs, seldom seen but deeply sensed. Soon he would face the consuming problem of adolescence–how to have it off with some girl and thus pass through the flame into manhood, and avoid the traps that society laid in the way. Or perhaps this rather cynical view was outdated now. Maybe the wave of sexual freedom that had washed over earlier generations had made things easier. Somehow, though, Renfrew suspected otherwise. What was worse, he could think of nothing very straightforward he himself could hope to do about the matter. Perhaps relying on the intuition of the boy himself was the best path. So what guidance could he give Johnny? "See here, son, remember one thing–don't take any advice." He could see Johnny's eyes widen and the boy reply, "But that's silly, Daddy. If I take your advice, I'm doing the opposite of what you say." Renfrew smiled. Paradoxes sprouted everywhere.

A small student band made a great noisy thing of the announced total, several kilograms in all. Boys cheered. A man nearby muttered, "Livin' off a yes'day," and Renfrew said drily, "Frapping right."

There was a feeling here of salvaging the lore and ore of the past, not making anything new. Like the country itself, he thought.

Bicycling home, Johnny wanted to stop and see the Bluebell Country Club, an unbearably cute name for an eighteenth-century stone cottage near the Cam. In it a Miss Bell kept a cat hotel, for owners who were away.