Scale, p.16
Scale, page 16
The cover was as hard as the road itself, and ridiculously heavy. Someone hooked an ivory prying bar under the edge and raised it enough for the rest of them to grab it and move it aside. The pit wasn’t deep, and it was occupied mostly by a large, six-spoked metal wheel, with two short vertical bars rising up from opposite points on the circumference – presumably handles to help turn it? But Jake held off from touching anything, and his reticence turned out to be prudent; another member of the team produced some tools and started meddling with the circuitry beside the wheel, while an assistant shone a flashlight into the pit.
“We don’t have long,” the tall man warned them, glancing out across the water. Jake followed his gaze, and though he couldn’t see anything unusual, he could hear a deep thrumming that seemed to emanate from the river.
An electrical spark lit up the pit, accompanied by a pungent odor, but the woman who’d caused it was unharmed, and actually looked pleased. Jake saw that she’d attached some kind of jumper cable across two of the existing wires ... and the wheel that he’d thought they might soon be struggling to rotate by hand had begun, slowly, turning of its own accord. This was not, in itself, a spectacular achievement, but a vibration through the ground accompanying the motion suggested that some hidden engine the electrician had started was performing a much larger task, for which the wheel was serving merely as an indicator. And as the team rose to their feet and moved away from the pit, a dark rectangular tongue began sliding out from the riverbank, extending the road across a stretch of water.
“Out of sight, quickly!” the tall man urged them. Jake ran back to where he’d discarded his spread-shoes, and soon they were all off the road and back among the shrubs. The truck still stood where it had been all along, but Jake could make out three figures seated in the cabin; whether they resembled the three captives to any degree he couldn’t say, but he wasn’t sure if that mattered.
From where he was, it was hard to track the progress of the bridge, but the vibration from the engine halted, suggesting it had reached its full extension. Jake peered between the foliage, trying to get a glimpse of what was happening on the river, and saw a dark form rising up above the water. The submarine had broken the surface.
The truck set off down the road; it was only visible intermittently, but Jake saw it pass onto the bridge. He expected it to halt at the end, but after shifting his head back and forth to convince himself he hadn’t just lost sight of it, he realized that it had driven right into the tower at the top of the submarine.
He pictured the dozen stowaways clambering out of the truck, and taking on the submarine crew. They had at least three captured rifles with Scale Seven bullets, and maybe there’d been more in the truck, but the whole idea still seemed foolhardy. He was just thankful Shane hadn’t been part of that lunacy, or the report to his mother would have been hard to deliver.
The tall man declared, “All right, time to join them!”
Everyone began moving toward the road. The stowaways might have gained admittance, but they were expecting more support. Jake went with the flow, to keep from raising suspicions, but his heart was pounding. There were no separate tasks for the group anymore; they were all fighting the same battle.
As he reached the roadside, he finally spotted Shane, who was lagging behind Thaddeus and his friends. Jake ran toward him and managed to stumble into his path, hoping it looked to bystanders like an accident born of his enthusiasm.
“You’ve done enough,” he told Shane quietly, as they helped each other regain balance. “It’s time to walk away.”
“Who the fuck are you?” Shane demanded.
“Your mother sent me to find you. She’s going out of her mind. Don’t do this to her, please. You’ve done enough already; you don’t want a bullet in the head.”
“Thaddeus!” Shane bellowed. “There’s a fucking spy here!”
Jake said, “That’s disappointing.” Having volunteered to join Spotlight, he could hardly complain about being dragged into the conflict, but it still seemed ungrateful when he’d actually done nothing but try to save this kid’s life.
As a dozen angry people converged on him, Jake suppressed any instinct to resist, and placed his hands on his head in surrender. They weren’t animals, they hadn’t killed the sentries; he could survive a stint of partial burial while waiting to be rescued.
It was Thaddeus who bound his hands then turned Jake around roughly to face him. “Who have you told about the operation?”
“No one.”
One of Thaddeus’s friends said, “He’s been following us since your apartment. I saw him outside.”
“I’m not working for the separatists,” Jake insisted. “Shane’s mother hired me to find him. I had no idea I was going to end up here.”
Thaddeus said, “We don’t have time for this shit, and we can’t spare anyone to stay back and babysit. I say we bring all four prisoners along as hostages.”
“I’m no use as a hostage,” Jake explained. “The separatists won’t care what you do to me.”
“Shut up,” Thaddeus said, and punched him in the face.
Jake listened woozily to snatches of the debate that followed, but Thaddeus seemed to win out. Someone stuffed a rag into his mouth, then as he was dragged onto the road, he saw one of the sentries in a similar condition.
I’m in, he thought, as they marched along the bridge toward the submarine’s dark aperture. No one wanted me, but here I am.
Chapter 26
Loretta wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting from the Great Lepton Engineering Exhibit, but the hall had the feeling of a mid-level trade show, organized a bit too hastily for its own good.
The first booth she encountered made her smile, despite herself; a device was displaying an image of Orphan Jane from the newspaper comic strip, somehow come to life and skipping with a rope, while she chanted her cringe-inducing signature rhyme over and over: I might be small, but I can do it all; I won’t grow tall, but I will never fall.
“We might finally get the movies,” she suggested to Dahlia. “But I hope they can come up with some better scripts. And I can’t see where the projector is.”
“There is no projector,” the woman overseeing the booth explained. “The electronics is steering a beam of cathode rays across the screen, drawing and redrawing the picture so rapidly that it seems to be in motion.”
“Why does that need Scale Seven materials?” Loretta wondered. Even the simplest valves had managed to manipulate cathode rays.
“They’re used in the tape that holds the picture information,” the woman explained, gesturing to a large cabinet under the display. “It’s still a bit bulky at present, but once the device has been refined a little further, we could have a theater in every home!”
Dahlia drew Loretta away before declaring, “I’ll pass on Orphan Jane, just take me to the knives.”
They scanned the signs, and were not disappointed. At the utensils display, a man was busy carving up various items of food using knives and forks made of gleaming metal, and offering the results to onlookers. Dahlia took a morsel of steak from the samples plate and popped it into her mouth.
“The edges are very well defined,” she declared approvingly. “No stringy fibers hanging off the cut.” She asked the carver, “How much would these knives cost?”
“That’s not really settled yet,” he admitted.
“Are any of them for sale now?”
“No, these are demonstration models.”
Dahlia nodded understandingly, and turned to Loretta. “I suppose they’ll need proper smelters or whatever, before they can go into mass production.”
“So do you really think Wendale would try to stop us making these things?” Loretta replied. “Every Scale Seven farmer’s kid can make a bone shiv that’s just as threatening.”
Dahlia sighed. “It’s not about any one product. They’re just afraid of us living up to our potential, when our tiny little hands should be busy making things for them.”
Loretta was no longer sure when she was joking. “Where do you get this nonsense?”
“It’s not nonsense. You think they could make their own watches in D1, with gears a tenth the size of their fingers?”
“We make watches for ourselves,” Loretta countered. “There are tweezers, and magnifying lenses. It’s not that hard.”
“But we’ll always do it better and faster for them than they can do it for themselves,” Dahlia replied.
“Okay. But we get paid for those watches, don’t we? Having skills that other people value is not a burden; all that proves is that they’ll always want to trade with us. We need them to travel long distances and bring us things we don’t have time to gather ourselves.”
“Which is why they don’t want us to have faster transport,” Dahlia declared. “Then we wouldn’t need them at all.”
The adjacent booth had a vise set up, into whose jaws participants could place various objects. As they watched, a girl put a lump of granite between the plates, then turned the handle, easily reducing the mineral to powder. The boy who followed her inserted a substantial looking bolt – of Scale Zero steel – and flattened it satisfyingly into a kind of tinfoil pancake.
Loretta couldn’t deny the appeal of these demonstrations, or the ultimate usefulness of a whole suite of Scale Seven tools, matched, at last, to the strength of those who wielded them. But nothing here made the case for secession. The only thing the national government had complained about was the launch of a rocket without the required safety assessment, and who could blame them? She’d been terrified herself when the desert had lit up and the ground had shaken, and if Friendship had fallen from the sky, it could have come down anywhere. Why shouldn’t the whole nation play a part in setting the rules for a venture like that, when the effects of any mishap were unlikely to be confined to some speck of Scale Seven territory?
“Hey, did you see that?” Dahlia pointed to a sign.
They followed the arrows out into a floodlit courtyard, where a group of riggers were creating a tower made entirely out of scaffolding. As a growing audience looked on, they bolted together metal tubes into cross-braced frames and skeletal boxes, layer after layer, rising up above the roof of the hall, then continuing to climb into the night air.
The structure itself was nothing to rival the most modest achievements of even their closest neighbors. But it supported the riggers’ weight, while a dozen of them clambered over the struts. Loretta could see the bottom frames digging into the ground under the pressure; she hoped the area had been properly surveyed, and the whole thing wouldn’t topple as the rock beneath it fractured unevenly. In real buildings, the foundations would require an awful lot of work to make them safe. But the sight of her own people – with flesh a quarter of a million times more dense than that of the skyscraper-builders of D1 – clambering ever higher on this metal web, was enough to leave a lump in her throat. Wendale would meddle with this at their peril; let Scale Seven engineers study the new materials and write the new construction code – not rushing it, but not waiting for the imprimatur of people with no hope of grasping what Scale Seven steel could do before Loretta and everyone she knew was dead.
Dahlia caught the expression on her face. “You’re besotted now. Admit it.”
“I am,” Loretta agreed. “But I bet we can still make this work without excising ourselves from Stedland.”
“They don’t want to make it work,” Dahlia retorted.
“Who? Wendale, or our beloved Council?”
Dahlia paused. “Maybe both.”
“Well, that’s very even-handed, but even if both sides are intent on a civil war, I don’t see any reason to indulge them.”
“You think there’s some kind of piecemeal solution,” Dahlia complained. “We get to do what we like in ... what? Manufacturing? Construction? Medicine? While for everything else, we’re still stuck under their pudgy thumb.”
Loretta said, “Manufacturing, construction and medicine sound like a good start.” She looked up at the scaffolders; their handiwork had to be close to the equivalent of a three-story building now. “Let’s go home,” she said. “I’m pretty sure they’re not going to unveil a high-speed rail line in the next twenty seconds.”
Outside the hall, a newspaper seller was hawking the latest edition of the Tribune. Loretta almost walked past, but then she saw the headline: A BOMB IN EVERY HOME?
She bought a copy, and stood reading the article under a streetlamp, before quoting one passage aloud. “‘Sources who have examined the details of the generators said to be essential for the new Scale Seven technologies have warned that the devices could be adapted into dangerous weapons, capable of destroying whole cities in an instant.’”
“Do you believe that?” Dahlia asked skeptically. “Or is it just nationalist propaganda?”
“I don’t know. How would it serve their cause? I suppose it might make the other scales more afraid of granting Scale Seven autonomy. But it might just as easily be propaganda from the Council. If we need these generators to get any of the benefits of lepton engineering, inventing a reason why Wendale won’t let us have them makes a much stronger case for secession. They might not care about Scale Seven knives, or scaffolding, but if we can’t make even the most innocent things without making a potential weapon first, it really would be all or nothing.”
“You overcomplicate everything,” Dahlia replied.
“Maybe,” Loretta conceded. “But what’s the simplest explanation? If it’s not a lie from the Council, maybe it’s not a lie from Wendale either. Maybe it’s the truth.”
She’d really just been pushing back at Dahlia’s rhetoric, but the fact that the Council was making a grab for power didn’t preclude the possibility that there was a much sharper divide between the two sides’ interests than any tenuous claims about the national government stifling innovation. If the generators really did pose a risk, both parties could have far better reasons to be pushing their agendas than she’d realized.
Or, to be fair, than they’d ever acknowledged themselves.
“For G8, it was all about keeping this quiet until they could fight off the response they were sure it would trigger,” she said.
“If that’s true, were they wrong?” Dahlia replied. “Or did Wendale do just what they’d predicted?”
Loretta read through the article again. She didn’t understand the science well enough to be sure of every step in the argument, but it sounded at least vaguely plausible. Every Scale Seven material required more energy to forge than the Scale Zero equivalents, and not just because there were more atoms packed into a given volume. All the forces within and between the molecules were stronger; each one was like a more tightly wound spring. If the generators could supply that much energy fast enough to satisfy Scale Seven’s rates of consumption, releasing it even more rapidly could pose a danger.
The article did not suggest that the generators themselves were prone to blowing up, wiping out a city or two because some dial had been turned to the wrong setting. It wasn’t even clear if an existing device could be maliciously repurposed. But at the very least, the underlying technology could serve either cause, and the skills required to design and manufacture one kind of device would take you most of the way toward a capacity to construct the other.
“How do we fix this?” she asked. “How do we get to keep the generators, without terrifying everyone else – or making their fears worse, by threatening them with this just to make them back off?”
Dahlia said, “If we can make them back off, their fears are their problem, not ours. This is a good thing. Once we build enough of these machines, they’ll have no choice but to leave us alone. Mind their own business, and let us live exactly how we want to.”
Loretta regarded her with dismay. “You really think it ends there? With the rest of the world afraid that we’ll soon be demanding whatever we want from them? And if you think they can’t make their own watches, just watch how fast they can make their own bombs.”
“Just admit it,” Dahlia taunted her. “The choice now is between secession, or throwing away all our advantages to live as humble little tinkerers, doing exactly what suits the larger scales, and no more.”
“I don’t believe that,” Loretta said flatly.
“Then what do you believe?”
“I don’t know. I just know that nothing’s settled, and we still have more than eight hours until morning.”
Chapter 27
Jake was beginning to suspect that whoever had designed the submarine had not been given much time to work on its internal acoustic properties. After a few seconds on board, it was already apparent to him that Scale Seven metals were by far the most merciless reflectors of sound yet discovered, and that the reverberating clanks, footsteps and shouts arriving delayed and jumbled from all directions could not have been conducive to the occupants’ equanimity during normal operations, let alone in the middle of a battle. He did take some comfort from the lack of audible gunfire – which surely meant no gunfire at all. He didn’t know if people were more worried about punctures to the hull or ricocheting bullets, but any evidence of restraint amidst the chaos had to be a good sign.
While the hijackers had advanced into the depths of the vessel, he’d been left tied up in the back of the truck with the three captive sentries, and one nationalist guard watching over them. One of the sentries kept glancing at him quizzically, as if the mere fact that the man didn’t recognize him as a colleague implied that Jake might have entered the fray from a higher echelon of Spotlight, in possession of some kind of superior knowledge of their situation, and maybe even the means to summon help with a secret transmitter wired up to some still-mobile body part. Jake didn’t trust himself to convey with any clarity just how misplaced such hopes would be, so he tried to keep his expression neutral, even if this risked making him appear unduly sanguine.
