Harvey was grinning too, happy enough that not even being classed with the Shadowspawn annoyed him. He supposed that from the point of view of someone who couldn't Wreak at all, it was fair enough.
'Hey, wait a minute,' Boase said thoughtfully, pausing in midprod at the smartscreen. 'I think I've just had a thought.'
'Happens to most people with functioning brain stems every now and then. What sort of thought?'
'The Fermi Paradox.'
'What…Oh, why we haven't had little green men droppin' in on us in flying saucers?'
'Yes. We know there are planets around most stars and a lot of them are Earth-like, we know that for sure now. Why hasn't anyone shown up or at least sent a message? But it just occurred to me that it's quite likely any species with a conscious brain would eventually evolve the Power-or some subset of every species would. And that means no science.'
'How so?'
'Well, to invent the scientific method, you've got to believe in an orderly, rational, deterministic universe. The sort of billiard-ball world Newton and Laplace thought they were discovering.'
'Hell, that isn't the whole truth, is it?'
'No, but it's the indispensible first step. But if the Power is around, the universe wouldn't feel that way. It would be magical!'
The word sounded slightly obscene in the scientist's mouth. He went on:
'It would be irrational, arbitrary. Mhabrogast glyphs, water running uphill because you wanted it to, doing things because they felt lucky, shaping reality by sheer willpower. I don't see how you could even get as far as a Hellenistic view of the world with that stuff around. Not if you're living in a fairy-tale world for real. It would look like Hansel and Gretel all the way down, and that means you'd never discover any way to really analyze the world-or even just the Power. And without that, you'd always be limited to what brains could handle, which means no interstellar flight. And if you had telepathy, would you ever want radio?'
'Phones are a lot less trouble.'
'But not at first. And you'd never think that way to begin with.'
Harvey looked up into the blue arch of the sky. 'Oh, great, a universe full of Shadowspawn.'
'Except here.'
'Except here from the Bronze Age to the Victorians,' Harvey said. He slapped Boase on the back hard enough to stagger him a little. 'And with your help, Professor, we're going to keep it that way!'
Peter shrugged, embarrassed. 'Anyway, the effect only lasted thirty-eight seconds,' he said disgustedly. 'Come on, Duquesne-'
A conversation happened; Harvey Ledbetter didn't even try to follow it. For one thing it was in New Middle Physics Babbleonian, a language he had never learned, and for another, unless he wanted to Wreak he could hear only half of it.
'What happened?' he said, when the other American pocketed his phone.
'Well-'
Harvey listened to two sentences and then held up a hand. 'In Ignoramish!' he protested. 'Pretend you're Samantha Carter trying to tell O'Neil something.'
'Oh, you watched SG-1 when you were a kid too?'
'Professor!' Harvey said; and he'd been a young adult, which suddenly made him feel his sixty-odd years more.
Boase stood silent for a minute, obviously lost in thought, then shook himself.
'Ah…we blew a fuse.'
'That mean what it sounds like?'
'No, it's just a metaphor, and not a very good one either. Equipment failure, let's say. There was a spillover of…A fuse blew. But we have proof of concept.'
' Yes!' Harvey shouted, punching his fist in the air.
When it came down he pointed his finger at the younger man's face.
'Son, if Duquesne did have a spunky, red-haired daughter, your handsome assistant ashes would get thoroughly hauled. She'd not only be smooching you, she'd be throwing herself on her back and throwing her heels towards her ears right this-'
'Hey, I'm not his assistant!' Boase said. 'Hell, I'm his boss, if anything. I'm the theorist. He's the experimentalist. And most physicists do their best work in their thirties!'
'Yeah, he's just the man with the soldering iron.' Harvey chortled. 'You run along now and make one that's reliable for days at a time and doesn't weigh more than half a ton. Something we could put on an eighteen-wheeler truck and not take up more than, oh, half the load would do right nice.'
'Wait a minute! Going from proof of concept to-'
'You git, you high-forehead wonder, you!'
Harvey stood quiet for a moment and then pulled out his own phone. It had a specialized little program that not only ate all record of the conversation at either end but erased it from the servers in between.
I come from a place northwest of San Antonio, he thought whimsically, as he waited for the acknowledgment icon as the little machines shook hands. Paranoia County.
Operation sheet is go, he tapped out.
It is?
Yeah. Fondest expectations and all.
A long pause, and then: All right. I'll want details on that, but provided you satisfy me, Defarge can proceed. Surprised you got Mowgli to sign off on it.
I'm persuasive.
He turned off the phone function and did a purge just to be sure, then drew back his arm and threw. The little black oblong soared away, turning in the air and then hitting a lakeside rock with a faint crack . The pieces went into the lake like a string of pebbles, and then the crystal blue water closed over them.
'Hallelujah,' he whispered.
Deep within his mind an image of a mountain city grew. And a fire brighter than a thousand suns. When he spoke again, for a moment his voice was an exultant shout that echoed off the hills: ' 'For I am become death, breaker of worlds.''
'At last, a place where neither of us sticks out, Jack,' Anjali Guha said, looking out the window of her side of the cab. 'Here in the entranceway to Europe.'
'More like the stinking lower intestine of Europe,' he said sourly, slumped behind the wheel of the waiting vehicle; the elevation gave a good view. 'Which orifice it uses to eat and crap.'
'I grant it is not beautiful,' she said, and sniffed at air heavy with a mixture of stale brackish water and every variety of hydrocarbon. 'Nor is it a rose garden.'
Europoort-Scheldt wasn't. The whole area was reclaimed marshland in the Scheldt delta, flat as a tabletop, and covered in gray concrete for the most part to match the gray North Sea just visible beyond the cranes and container blocks, and the gray November sky above. The stacks of shipping containers around them were the most colorful things in sight, their blue and red and yellow in contrast to the many acres of oil refinery, the storage tanks, and the vast coal and iron-ore heaps. Boxy, hulking modern freighters plowed the waters, and heavy trucks and strings of freight cars moved in and out in an intricate computer-controlled dance.
'Still, Veracruz was worse.'
'Yeah, it literally smelled like shit. This just smells like PetroDystopiaLand.'
But they both did fit in with the human geography; Farmer had a generic northwest European look, as long as he didn't open his mouth and expose his heavily accented Dutch or French or American-variety English, and the Netherlands' long-standing connections with the east made her South Asian features boringly unremarkable anywhere outside the depths of tulip-growing rural Blondistan.
Besides which, I speak better Dutch than Jack does, she thought a little snidely. Better English, too, if you want to be picky, and I do .
They were dressed in stained blue overalls, and they had really good forged IDs as well. None of that would help them if some Shadowspawn simply followed a line of might-be down to the docks. Her own slight talent was already starting to shrill at her, a feeling like giant snake slithering through her dreams. Or as if her mind had looked
