Few machines worked very well any more. Pharmek had been closed for six months because of severe maintenance problems. At first people had been brought in to replace the machines, but it had soon become apparent that the factories could not operate with people alone.
He stopped by a wooden post and rolled his window down to get a clear view of the directions.
All of Wales seemed covered with phosphorescent sea-foam. Out of the black sky came galaxies of brilliant flakes, each charged with mysterious light. He rolled the window up and watched flakes fall on his windshield, flashing as the wipers caught them and pushed them aside.
The headlights were off, even though it was night. He could see by the snowglow. The heater made ominous gurgles and he urged the car on.
Fifteen minutes later, he made a right turn onto a narrow, snow-shrouded gravel road and descended into Camusfearna. The tiny inlet held only four houses and a small boat dock, now locked in jagged, crusty sea-ice. The houses with their warm yellow lights were clearly visible through the snow, but the ocean beyond was as black and empty as the sky.
Last house on the north side, Gogarty had said. He missed the turn, rolled roughly over frozen sod and grass, and backed up to regain the road.
He hadn’t done anything half this insane in thirty years. The Citroen’s motor chuffed, snarled and stalled barely ten meters from the old, narrow garage. Snowglow swirled and dreamed.
Gogarty’s dwelling was a very old plastered and whitewashed stone cottage, shaped like a brick-two stories topped with a slate shingle roof. On the northern end of the house a garage had been appended, ribbed metal sheet and wood frame also painted white. The garage door opened, adding a dim orange-yellow square to the universal blue-green. Paulsen-Fuchs pulled the bottle from the bag, stuffed it into his coat and climbed out of the car, boots making little pressure-waves of light in the snow.
“By God,” Gogarty said, coming to meet him. “I didn’t expect you to try the journey in this weather.”
“Yes, well,” Paulsen-Fuchs said. “The craziness of a bored old man, no?”
“Come on in. There’s a fire—thank God wood still bums! And hot tea, coffee, whatever you want.”
“Scotch!” Paulsen-Fuchs cried, clapping his gloved hands together.
“Well,” Gogarty said, opening the door. “This is Wales; and whiskey’s scarce everywhere. None of that, regrettably.”
“I brought my own,” Paulsen-Fuchs said, pulling a bottle of Glenlivet from beneath his coat “Very rare, very expensive.”
The flames crackled and snapped cheerily within the stone fireplace, supplementing the uncertain electric lights. The interior of the cottage was a jumble of desks—three of them in the main room—bookcases, a battery- powered computer—” Hasn’t worked in three months,” Gogarty said—an etagere filled with seashells and bottled fish, an antique rose and velvet daybed, a manual Olympia typewriter—now worth a small fortune—a drafting table almost hidden beneath unrolled cyanotypes. The walls were decorated with framed eighteenth century flower prints.
Gogarty took the tea kettle off the fire and poured out two cups. Paulsen-Fuchs sat in a worn overstuffed chair and sipped the gunpowder brew appreciatively. Two cats, an orange tabby with spiky fur and a pug-nosed black long-hair, sauntered into the room and stationed themselves before the fire, blinking at him with mild curiosity and resentment.
“I’ll share a whiskey with you later,” Gogarty said, sitting on a stool across from the chair. “Right now, I thought you’d like to see this.”
“Your ‘ghost’?” Paulsen-Fuchs asked.
Gogarty nodded and reached into his sweater pocket. He removed a folded piece of brilliant white paper and handed it to Paulsen-Fuchs. “It’s for you, too. Both our names. But it arrived here two days ago. In the mail box, though there hasn’t been mail delivery for a week. Not out here. I posted my letter to you in Pwllheli.”
Paulsen-Fuchs unfolded the letter. The paper was unusual, buff-textured and almost blindingly white. On one side was a neatly handwritten message in black. Paulsen-Fuchs read the message and looked up at Gogarty.
“Now read it again,” Gogarty said. The message had been short enough that most of it remained in his memory. The second time he read it, however, it had changed.
Dear Sean and Paul
Fair warning to the wise. Sufficient. Small changes now, big coming. VERY big. Gogarty can figure it out. He has the means. The theory. Others are being alerted. Spread the word.
“Every time, it’s different. Sometimes more elaborate, sometimes very concise. I’ve taken to recording what it says each time I read it.” Gogarty held out his hand and rubbed his fingers. Paulsen-Fuchs handed him the letter.
“It’s not paper,” Gogarty said. He dipped it in his tea cup. The letter did not absorb, nor did it drip upon removal. He held it in both hands and made a vigorous tearing motion. Though he carried the motion through, the letter remained in one piece, in one hand, having passed through the other hand in some unobvious fashion. “Care to read it again?”
Paulsen-Fuchs shook his head. “So it is not real,” he said.
“Oh, it’s real enough to be here whenever I want to read it It’s just never quite the same, which leads me to believe it isn’t made of matter.”
“It is not a prank.”
Gogarty laughed. “No, I think not.”
“Bernard is not dead.”
Gogarty nodded. “No. Bernard went with his noocytes, and I believe his noocytes are in the same location as the North American noocytes. If ‘location’ is the proper word.”
“And where would that be? Another dimension?”
Gogarty shook his head vigorously. “My goodness, no. Right here. Right down where everything begins. We’re macro-scale, of course, so when we investigate our world, we tend to look outward, to the stars. But the noocytes—they are microscale. They have a hard time even conceiving of the stars. So they look inward. For them, discovery lies in the very small. And if we can assume that the North American noocytes rapidly created an advanced civilization—something that seems obvious—then we can assume they found a way to investigate the very small.”
“Smaller than themselves.”
“Smaller by an even greater factor than our smallness compared to a galaxy.”
“You are talking about quantum lengths?” Paulsen-Fuchs knew little about such things, but he was not totally ignorant.
Gogarty nodded. “Now it so happens that the very small is my specialty. That’s why I was called up for this noocyte investigation in the first place. Most of my work deals with lengths smaller than ten to the minus thirty- third centimeters. The Planck-Wheeler length. And I think we can look to the submicroscale to discover where the noocytes went, and why.”
“Why, then?” Paulsen-Fuchs asked.
Gogarty pulled out a stack of papers filled with text and equations written by hand. “Information can be stored even more compactly than in molecular memory. It can be stored in the structure of space-time. What is matter, after all, but a standing-wave of information in the vacuum? The noocytes undoubtedly discovered this, worked with it—have you heard about Los Angeles?”
“No. What about it?”
“Even before the noocytes disappeared, Los Angeles and the coastline south to Tijuana vanished. Or rather, became something else. A big experiment, perhaps. A dress rehearsal for what’s happening now.”
Paulsen-Fuchs nodded without really comprehending and leaned back in the chair with his cup. “It was difficult getting here,” he said. “More even than I expected.”
“The rules have changed,” Gogarty said.
“That seems to be the consensus. But why, and hi what fashion?”
