Scale, p.10
Scale, page 10
He went into the darkroom, closed the door, and took the reel of film out of his camera. He knew how to find all the trays and reagents by touch; he only turned on the safety light after the film had been developed and fixed.
He adjusted the enlarger for the greatest magnification it could produce, and set about methodically working through the negatives, printing off three copies of each side of each page. The documents were not in Panscala, but he recognized enough of the words to be fairly sure that they were written in the current Scale Seven dialect rather than any kind of code. As well as all the text, there were mathematical formulas, and quite a few diagrams: schematics of machinery, and various graphs and plots.
One page contained what seemed to be a picture of two atomic nuclei, wrapped in a dumbbell-shaped surface labeled with the word “lepton” that Yukio had been so enamoured with. Sam stared at the image, but then he heard his phone ringing, and he left the prints to dry.
The call was from Loretta, not Jessica. She said, “They’ve found the documents; they didn’t say where. And they have a message for you to pass on to Jessica, telling her where she’ll find Cara.”
Sam didn’t need to feign surprise; whatever he’d hoped for, he hadn’t expected anything to happen so quickly.
“They’re freeing her? Right now?”
“That’s what they told me.”
“And you believe them?”
Loretta said, “I don’t see why they’d lie, but we’ll know soon enough.”
Chapter 19
A flock of herons rose up from the shore as Jessica approached the promontory that marked the start of the nature reserve. She’d taken off her shoes, and now she wanted more than ever to break into a run, but the thicket of vegetation forced her to stay close to the waterline, and each step that didn’t actually sink into the mud left her struggling to keep her balance.
She slogged her way toward the tip of the headland, almost as breathless as if she was actually jogging. She’d been instructed by the kidnappers not to travel to the rendezvous point by boat, but the sign at the end of the access road had conveyed the same warning. As she rounded the headland she could see why: birds were wading in the shallows dozens of meters from the shore, and even a dinghy would have run aground further out, leaving her to cross the treacherous mudflats on foot.
As more of the bay came into view, she spotted a figure kneeling at the water’s edge, head bowed, hands tied, blindfolded. Jessica’s first impulse was to call out, but her chest tightened and she couldn’t make a sound. As she struggled to regain control of her body, she changed her mind; she was still so far away that if Cara couldn’t see her, any words of reassurance shouted from this distance would only be confusing and distressing. So she staggered through the mud in silence, willing herself forward as fast as she could.
Her sister remained almost motionless, raising her head wearily every now and then. If she’d been screaming for help, she’d given up long ago, but perhaps she’d been instructed to stay quiet from the start.
Jessica paused to catch her breath, then she bellowed, “Cara! I’m almost there!”
Cara turned toward her and croaked something hoarsely, but made no move to rise to her feet. Jessica had to stop herself from trying to run; she knew she’d end up flat on her face.
When she reached Cara, she spoke her name again gently, and placed a hand on her shoulder. “I’m here now. You’re safe.”
“Okay.” Cara’s teeth were chattering; her clothes were soaked and she had mud all over her.
“I’m going to untie your hands.” Jessica squatted down beside her, then realized that what she’d taken to be a knotted cord was some kind of molded plastic cuffs that would need to be cut. “Sorry, I don’t have a knife.” She’d brought food and water, but it had never occurred to her that she’d need something sharp. “Should I take the blindfold off?”
“Is it daytime?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t take it off yet.”
“All right. Are you cold?”
“Yes.”
Jessica pulled the blanket out of her backpack and wrapped it around her, then put an arm across her shoulders. “Do you think you can walk?”
“Sure. I walked here through the water.”
“You walked here?”
Cara said, “I woke up in a small boat. It didn’t feel like it was moving, and when I reached over the side I realized it was stuck in the mud. So I climbed out and started walking.”
“You could have drowned.”
“It wasn’t that deep. Not when I started, and if the water got deeper I just turned around and walked the other way.”
Jessica looked out across the shallows. There was no sign of the boat, so either it had drifted off on its own, or someone had towed it away.
They stood up together. “This way,” she said, turning Cara to the east. “It’s going to take a while to reach the car. Maybe forty minutes. Do you want some water first?”
“Yes please.”
Jessica held the flask to her sister’s lips; half of the water spilled down her chin, and after a while she pulled her mouth away, coughing.
“Are you hungry?”
“No. They fed me. It can wait.”
“All right. You want to get going?”
Cara nodded.
They set off together, moving slowly over the slippery mud. Cara was clearly tired and disoriented, but she wasn’t helpless; even with the blindfold, she retained her sense of balance, and she did as much as Jessica to adjust her footing to keep the two of them upright.
“How long has it been?” Cara asked.
“Two weeks,” Jessica replied.
“Ha!”
“What?”
Cara said, “I counted forty-one meals. I thought they might be trying to confuse me, but they must have been giving me three a day, like clockwork.”
“Okay.”
“Do you know why they let me go?”
“Not really,” Jessica admitted. “Yesterday I hired someone in D4 to look for you. He called me a couple of hours ago with a message from the kidnappers, but I don’t know if he found them, or they found him.” She hesitated. “Do you know why they took you in the first place? They never asked for a ransom.”
“I was trying to help Malcolm.”
“I don’t understand.”
Cara laughed feebly. “I did something stupid. I threatened someone, to try to force them to help him.”
That made no sense, but Jessica didn’t push her. “Do you know where they took you?”
“They drugged me before they moved me,” Cara replied, “and they never took the blindfold off. They kept me in a tiny cell; the air stank, and there were a lot of strange noises. But it could have been anywhere.”
“We found Scale Seven footprints on the boat,” Jessica told her.
Cara laughed again; she seemed unsurprised. “The people I threatened were about that size.”
They walked for a while in silence. When they came around the tip of the promontory, Jessica let out an involuntary sob.
“I’m all right!” Cara assured her. “They didn’t hurt me.”
“But is it over?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“And if you go to the police?”
Cara said, “I promised them I wouldn’t do that, and I think they believed me. They know I’d end up in prison.”
“So if they weren’t afraid of that, why did they keep you so long? And then suddenly release you?”
“I think they must have got back what I stole from them,” Cara decided. “I was too ashamed to tell them where it was; I didn’t want to make trouble for the people who had it. But they must have found it anyway.”
“And that’s it? They won’t change their mind and decide you’re still a threat?”
Cara said, “I don’t even know what I took from them. I couldn’t read anything that small, and I was too afraid to get it copied or enlarged in case the pages were stamped ‘confidential’ and the photo shop turned me in. So if they got it back, that’s it. Their secret’s safe, whatever it was. I’m nothing to them now. It’s over.”
Chapter 20
“Where did you get this?” Yukio asked heatedly, brandishing the G8 report like a truncheon. Sam had rolled up the pages and packed them into a cardboard tube that he’d handed over in the Forty-five Café, hoping it would appear to any prying eyes like a decorative poster, an innocent gift to a friend. At the time, Yukio had treated Sam’s warning not to show the report to anyone, or even talk about it on the phone, as an amusing cloak-and-dagger indulgence, but now that he’d read it, it seemed the contents had been more than enough to make him take those precautions seriously. He’d shown up at Sam’s office unannounced, pretending it was some kind of amiable, spur-of-the-moment visit, until the door was closed behind them.
“I don’t know if I should tell you that,” Sam replied. “We made a deal to let these people announce everything for themselves, when they were ready.”
Yukio grimaced. “Do they know that I’ve read it?”
“Of course not!” Sam promised. “They don’t even know that I have it.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“If they did, I think they would have tried a lot harder to get it back.” He gestured at the orderly state of the room. “I mean, no one’s broken in and trashed the place.”
Yukio swung the tube at him in exasperation, but stopped short of landing a blow.
“So did any of it make sense to you?” Sam asked. “The only thing I’m sure about is that they’ve learned how to make Scale Seven metals. For all I know, the rest could be pure hype to bring in gullible investors.”
“Do you know what powers the sun?” Yukio asked him.
“Hot gases?”
“Nuclear fusion. If two light nuclei are brought close enough together, they can form a heavier one, and release a lot of energy.”
“Okay.” Sam vaguely remembered hearing this account before. “We already knew that, though, didn’t we? It’s not a new discovery.”
“That it happens in the sun is not a new discovery,” Yukio agreed. “If it happened on the Earth it would be different.”
“How does Scale Seven metal let you do that?”
“It doesn’t. But this report talks about all kinds of applications of what they call lepton engineering. Nuclei repel each other, because they all have a positive charge; you need to balance that with negatively charged leptons. But the heavier those leptons are, the less space they occupy, and the easier it becomes to bring the nuclei closer together and initiate fusion.”
“Which would mean ... what?” Sam couldn’t see how a miniature sun down on the ground would be manageable, let alone useful.
“The slow version they describe is like a kind of generator: it spits out protons and alpha particles at high velocity, which amounts to a strong electric current.”
“What’s the fast version?”
“They don’t actually talk about it,” Yukio admitted, “but it’s not hard to read between the lines. You could use the same techniques to make a bomb that could level a city.”
“Okay.” But if the report made no mention of bombs, Sam didn’t want to assume the worst. “The generators themselves could be useful, though?” Maybe they were already powering the underwater base, removing the need for endless supply runs to replenish stocks of more conventional fuels.
“Absolutely,” Yukio agreed. “And of course you could have one without the other, if you imposed that restriction and everybody honored it. But once the generators became commonplace, I doubt it would take much more innovation to figure out how to build a fusion-based weapon.”
Sam could see why G8 were so keen to control the way their findings were released to the public. Even Yukio, with no particular ax to grind, had zeroed right in on the worst possible reading.
He said, “There’s a lot more here than just fusion, isn’t there?”
“Of course. There are dozens of new materials and processes. I don’t understand everything they’ve described, but this could probably revolutionize structural engineering and manufacturing at every scale.” Yukio’s expression softened a little. “Potential weaponry aside, it’s all very beautiful. They’ve identified a class of enzymes that almost every cell uses to concentrate leptons – to pull the lightest ones out of one molecule and replace them with heavier ones from another source. That’s the key to everything that came after rootlife: the reaction that makes all the other scales possible. Getting the energy you need in exactly the right place is tricky, though; in biology, it always involves sets of different molecules whose leptons can be reshuffled into a state with lower energy overall. But to do it industrially, to make something like Scale Seven metals in bulk, you’d need a huge amount of power. So the fusion generators are essential; none of this would stack up commercially without them.”
Sam took heart from that; it meant there was a chance that G8’s entire interest in fusion was benign. But why did they need a whole city for themselves at the bottom of the river? Doing some secret tests out in the desert to avoid recklessly sharing dual-use technology with the world was one thing, but what were they preparing under the water?
“Are you going to tell anyone about this?”
Yukio scowled. “You asked me not to!”
Sam said, “I’m not going to hold you to that if you think people are in danger.”
“Are you going to tell me exactly who did this research? A government agency? A company? A foreign government?”
Sam hesitated. “I was hoping that once I knew what was in the report, it would be easy to decide if it would do more harm than good to keep it secret. It’s not that simple, though. But I can’t ask you to go against your conscience.”
“So I’m free to make my own decisions,” Yukio replied, “but you’re still going to keep me in the dark, because telling me all the details would be too much like making a decision yourself?”
When he put it like that, it sounded ridiculous. Sam told him everything he knew about Generation Eight’s activities, short of identifying Cara and Jessica.
“So they already have form for kidnapping,” Yukio observed gloomily, “and who knows what they did to the employee who leaked the documents? That makes me feel so much safer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But now that the D1 woman is safe, what’s the downside to telling the authorities everything? Retribution?”
“Perhaps,” Sam replied. “Though the kidnapping was more pre-emptive than punitive; once the information has spread irretrievably, I’m not so worried that they’d do anything out of pure vindictiveness.”
“That’s a much less cynical view than I’d expect from someone in your profession.”
“No, I just think corporations are a lot more pragmatic than jilted lovers.”
“Is this purely business, though?” Yukio replied. “Even if it started out as nothing but commercial R&D, they can’t be blind to the politics. Every scale has people with a grievance, who are convinced they’re under someone else’s thumb.”
Sam recalled his own inchoate resentment at the mere sight of Mauburg from the middle of the river. Even if you believed that no one wanted anything more than justice, what did that actually entail? Sticking to a treaty that a handful of representatives from each scale had agreed to, long ago? Pursuing some complicated biological, geographical and economic analysis?
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “But if you want to go public with this ... ”
Yukio shook his head impatiently. “Coming from me, all of this would be hearsay. I could show the report to some journalists and try to talk them through the science, or hand it over to the military and hope they take it seriously, but I have no direct knowledge of anything. You might not have seen the steel-making plant in the desert, or taken part in the negotiations with G8, and even your D7 colleague hasn’t seen the sonar traces from the riverbed, or the footprints on the boat, but you and she are the only people with anything like an overview of the whole thing. If the authorities are going to investigate this, they need to hear about it from someone with as much firsthand knowledge as possible, not a retired science teacher with some crackpot ideas about a medical research lab trying to build a super-weapon.”
“But you think I should tell them?” Sam pressed him.
“Yes! The kidnapping itself might be hard to prove in court, but the fact that G8 would go that far only makes me more suspicious about everything else they’re doing. And if their intentions started out honorable and they just went off the deep end in response to a blackmail threat, well ... where’s the harm in having their work vetted? If it turns out that there are no bombs in the desert, or on the riverbed, that will be great news, and the fact that the fusion technique itself leaked out earlier than they wanted isn’t going to matter in the long run. Whatever needs to be done to discourage people from making weapons isn’t going to stand or fall on a few days’ difference in the timing.”
When Yukio left, Sam sat brooding over the report’s revelations, but he still couldn’t bring himself to act. What if he was wrong about G8 punishing whistle-blowers after the fact? They had released Cara unharmed in the end, but if his threat to expose the riverbed base had not still been hanging over them, who knew what they would have done?
He picked up Idris from school, and forced himself to make cheerful small talk as they walked home through the twilight, but he was moving in a daze. Bombs that could level a city. If G8 were on the verge of building such things, they needed to be stopped. But what if they weren’t, and he merely spread the prerequisite knowledge more widely? Yukio’s assertion that a few days would make no difference might be misplaced; maybe G8 were working on a new kind of generator whose design would be harder to weaponize. And though they’d given Loretta the impression that after the magic ten days nothing Cara revealed could hurt them, the deal they’d actually arrived at had relied on getting the documents back once and for all. What they were willing to publish to the world, eventually, might be heavily redacted compared to the version Sam had in his hands.
