Scale, p.2
Scale, page 2
“Hello!” Jessica had said. “Please, come onboard!”
Sam reached the gangway and began the crossing, grateful that he could walk down the middle and feel as if the water was as distant as ever, even as the yacht bobbed up in the swell. The gangway did feel sturdy beneath his feet; the timber was probably Scale Two. When he stepped onto the deck the wood was much softer and springier, palpably yielding to his weight – but then, if the hull broke up the pieces might actually float, with enough spare buoyancy to hold up a single survivor of any scale.
Jessica backed away so he wouldn’t have to crane his neck too much to make eye contact. He was beginning to wish they’d spent more time discussing the case on the phone; the exchange’s rescalers couldn’t work any faster than the portable models, but it would have been more comfortable for both of them.
“How did you get here?” he asked.
Jessica was more accomplished with her rescaler than he was; Sam had barely stopped speaking when he heard his words repeated in tones more suited to her ears.
“Some friends with their own boat dropped me off,” she replied. “I’ll sail the Idyll back when we’re done here. Everything’s unlocked now, so feel free to look around, wherever you want.”
Now that he was actually standing on sixty-four decks’ worth of deck, the prospect of a thorough search felt even more daunting than he’d anticipated, but he’d packed enough food and water to keep himself going for a couple of hours, if it came to that. He’d consulted his old forensics textbooks before leaving the house, to be reminded that dried Scale One blood would be almost transparent to his vision, and far less sticky to his touch than that of his own scale. He’d brought along a wide-spectrum camera, but he couldn’t photograph every square millimeter of the boat. Hopefully Jessica would be able to persuade the D1 police to perform their own inspection once the Idyll was back in their jurisdiction, but in the meantime he was determined to do the best job he could under the circumstances.
“Do you have Cara’s passport?” he asked Jessica.
“It’s still in the cabin, I didn’t want to move anything. But I’ll get it.”
Sam set to work while she was gone, sketching a plan of the deck on gridded paper so he could keep track of his progress and log the position of anything he found.
When Jessica emerged with the passport, he gestured to her to put it on the deck. She stooped down and placed the open booklet upright in front of him, but it was only waist-high so he had to kneel to get a proper view. Passport photographs were captured and printed with care, so that viewers at any destination would perceive them as matching the subject. Sam spent a moment committing Cara’s face to memory, as much for the sake of possessing a mental picture of the person he was responsible for finding as in anticipation of any possibility that he might stumble upon her in the flesh. But the immediate benefit was to have a clear idea of the color of her hair – several shades lighter than Jessica’s, to his eyes – so he could at least recognize the owner if he found a strand or two around the boat.
He took a photograph of the passport, then told Jessica, “You should hang on to that now.” Then he set about searching the boat.
The deck probably hadn’t looked messy to Cara when she’d last been on board, and even with the Idyll unoccupied for two weeks it hadn’t exactly reverted to nature, but there were enough pieces of river-scented grit and debris scattered across the surface to provide a constant distraction. Among the fragments of mollusk shells, pieces of dried plant material, flecks of bird feces and the body parts of dead insects, evidence of humans was thin, and mostly mundane. Sam did find several hairs that were probably Cara’s, along with much shorter fibers of dyed rootlife textiles, which he knew were favored for Scale One clothing, at least in warm weather, in preference over anything more dense. When he brought the fibers to Jessica’s attention, after some squinting she was willing to attribute them to garments she remembered her sister wearing.
Sam stopped to quench his thirst; the work was far from strenuous, but most of the deck was drenched in sunlight. Jessica had settled into a chair beneath a shade cloth, reading a book but glancing up from it so often, even by Sam’s reckoning, that he doubted she was taking much of it in.
“There’s some Scale Four water in the cabin, if you run out,” she told him.
“Thank you.” It would only be polite for Cara to have kept some on board for her business meetings, and for the Dawn workers bringing her appliances. Sam had spotted bits of dark wood that had probably been scraped off the packing crates that held the stock. He wondered if it was worth interviewing any of those workers; they would have been on the boat more often than Landau, even if they’d had no time, or need, to converse with Cara.
He continued filling out the grid, crossing out the boxes on his sketch that he judged by eye to correspond to areas he’d searched. At one point he found a trace of a pale, gluey substance sticking to the wood, and he took a photograph just in case, but he suspected it was more likely to be seagull phlegm or wind-borne jellyfish flesh than a drop of Cara’s blood that a careless assailant had failed to wipe up.
When Sam first saw the dents, he wondered if they might just be minor damage to the timber that had arisen when the planks were being cut, or handled by the boatbuilder. But then he looked more closely, and realized that bits of marine detritus of precisely the kind he’d been staring at for the last fifteen minutes had been pushed into the hollows and embedded in the wood.
The depressions were about five millimeters long, maybe a quarter as wide, and a tenth as deep. They appeared in two roughly parallel rows, the pits aligned in the direction of the rows. There were only fifteen that he could see in total; at one end of the row there were three of a different shape than the rest. Apart from those three, the remaining twelve bore a strong resemblance to footprints – an eighth the size of those he might have made himself, in clay, but as deep, perhaps, as if the same amount of weight had been pushing down on the wood, exerting sixty-four times the pressure.
He glanced up toward Jessica, but held off asking her any stupid questions before he’d thought the whole thing through. Cara would not have routinely entertained Scale Seven visitors on the boat, if for no other reason than the unsuitability of the decking. But if this was a trail of footprints, why were there so few?
Because the visitor – or intruder – had come onto the boat using some less damaging mode of transport? And then been briefly obliged to abandon it and walk across the timber on their own two feet? Sam pictured a balloon-tired tractor, the size of one of Idris’s toys, chugging across the deck until some malfunction brought it to a halt and the passenger disembarked to make repairs.
“Did Cara ever visit D7?” he asked.
Jessica’s lips spread slowly into a bewildered grin. “Not that she ever told me. Why?”
“It looks like someone that size has been walking here. Either that, or someone taking very small steps in very sharp stilettos.”
“As far as I know, she never met anyone from beyond District Four.”
Sam stared down at the trail for a while, then he fetched a sheet of paper and a pencil from the trolley. He placed the paper over the footprints, and ran the pencil back and forth. He could take a photograph as well, but he believed this would capture a more accurate record of the shape.
Away from the footprints themselves, the pencil rubbing began to reveal some subtler, more shallow indentations in the timber. At first Sam thought they might just correspond to the natural grain of the wood, but then he realized that they were too regular; it looked as if a kind of mesh had left its mark, stamped into the deck with less force than the footprints, the pattern repeated and overlaid on itself.
Someone from D7 had walked across the deck of the Idyll in broad, lattice-soled footwear – a bit like snow shoes – to keep them from sinking into the wood. But they had lost their footing and slipped out of their special weight-spreading shoes for a while, before recovering, putting them back on, and continuing on their way.
Chapter 3
“These tracks are all over the deck,” Sam explained. “Not the easiest thing to notice at a glance, but ... ” He held up one of the rubbings again. “Kind of obvious, once you’ve found them.”
“And what do you expect me to do about this?” McKenna asked irritably.
“Send in divers.”
“Divers?”
“Search the river around the boat,” Sam urged him.
McKenna said, “Even if an assassin the size of this woman’s thumb managed to turf her overboard, the currents will have taken her far away by now. Nothing floats as far as a Scale One body: heavy enough to drown, but too light to hang around.”
Sam gestured at the confines of the office, dollhouse-sized to the victim’s family. “Jessica can’t come here in person to petition you, but would you talk to her like that? She deserves to know what happened to her sister.”
“She does,” McKenna conceded, “but that seems to have less and less to do with us, thanks to your excellent work with the footprints. You want me to forward them to our liaison in D7, to see if they can come up with a match?”
“Yes,” Sam replied. “They might not be unique, but they can’t be all that common.” He believed Scale Seven farmers might wear something similar to avoid compacting the soil, but that depended on the particular crops they were growing, and in any case the strange footwear was hardly a standard item in every household.
“All right, I’ll do that. Will that get you off my back?”
“You’re really not going to search the river?”
McKenna said, “If she’s down there, she’ll ripen and come up eventually. It’s not as if she’s lying there waiting for us, holding her breath.”
Sam left the station and headed east, doing his best to let go of a lingering sense of frustration and self-righteousness. If he really believed it was worth sending divers, he could always ask Jessica if she was willing to pay for them. But McKenna was probably right; a corpse floating along the boundary between the river’s top two layers would have been carried far downstream by now.
He glanced at his watch and quickened his pace; his next appointment was in thirty-two seconds, and it would be doubly rude to keep his friend waiting. He reached the Forty-five Café by 18:42:01 and looked around, to see that Yukio was just coming in through the eastern entrance. Sam raised a hand and signaled to him, and they approached one of the empty booths with seating that would meet their respective needs.
“How have you been?” Sam asked, reaching across the table to accept a handshake, even though he knew Yukio would tease him by maintaining his grip long enough for the heat to sting.
“I’m fine. Another grandchild, Chimako.”
Sam got his hand free, and managed not to wince. “Congratulations.”
“And you?”
“Noor and Idris are good. No additions to the family.”
They wrote out their orders, then raised the flag on the table so the waiter would come and collect the slips.
When they’d spoken on the phone Yukio had sounded no different than the last time, but in the flesh Sam found the accumulating signs of aging a little disconcerting. When they’d been children, he’d felt nothing but envy at his friend’s fast track to maturity, but now, at the back of his mind, it was impossible not to start making calculations: how many more times would they meet?
“What are you working on?” Yukio asked.
“A missing woman from D1 who was trading with D4, but seems to have an unexpected connection to D7.”
“Ha!” Yukio chortled piercingly. “That should be easy to wrap up.”
“Actually, I was hoping you could help me,” Sam admitted.
Yukio looked dubious. “I can try. Just don’t tell me she had a lover in D5 you want me to track down.”
“At this stage nothing would surprise me ... unless the lover found a way to make her pregnant; that would do it. But as far as I know, there’s no crime of passion here. I just want to tap your brain on the state of the art in electronics.” Yukio didn’t work in the industry, but he’d been a science teacher before he retired, and he’d always followed new technology closely.
“What does electronics have to do with the case?”
“The missing woman was importing vacuum tube systems from D4,” Sam explained. “But I’m starting to suspect that she might have had loftier ambitions.”
Yukio seemed amused that this could even be in doubt. “I don’t think I’ve seen a vacuum tube appliance for weeks.”
“So tell me about the replacement.”
They paused while the waiter delivered their orders. Sam glanced around the café, and was surprised to see that only about half the customers were gathered in mixed-scale groups. The whole point of the Forty-five’s location on the border was to make it easier for people to meet their friends from the adjacent district, but maybe the cuisine had turned out to be enough of an attraction in itself.
Yukio said, “Do you remember Foley’s experiment? When she found four new kinds of cathode rays?”
“Umm, vaguely.”
“Vacuum tubes work by heating a metal cathode, which gives off negatively charged rays that move through the vacuum to complete the circuit to the anode. By placing a grid between the cathode and the anode, you can use the voltage on the grid to turn the current up or down. A small change on the grid can make big changes to the current, so you can take the tiny signal you get from a radio receiver, or a magnetic tape head, and boost it to a level where it can drive a loudspeaker.”
“Okay.” Sam was pretty sure he’d read a similar exposition in a magazine at some point, when the devices were first making their mark. And now he took rescalers built into the telephone exchange for granted, where there’d once been chains of human interpreters that you’d needed to reserve long in advance, if you could afford to pay for them at all.
“Janet Foley was trying to understand cathode rays better. She found that as she heated the cathode more and more, the relationship between the voltage on the grid and the current through the tube became more complicated – as if there were new participants joining the race. When she brought in a magnetic field to see how much it curved the beam, it split it into five separate components, with masses for the new rays that were two, four, eight and sixteen times the mass of the original.”
“Yeah, and some people got quite excited,” Sam recalled. “The same pattern as the scales, at least as far as it went. But no one could explain why the two things should be connected.”
“Other experimenters pushed it from five rays to seven,” Yukio continued, “still following the doubling pattern. Everyone assumes there’s an eighth one there, just waiting to be found with the right equipment. But then Ongweso managed to pull cathode rays out of vaporized organic material ... and the mass of the rays depended on the scale of the plants he used, but not in the way you might have guessed. From rootlife, you could get the ordinary rays, and the others if you heated it enough. But from Scale One plants or animals, you could only get the double-mass rays or heavier; from Scale Two, you could only get quadruple-mass or greater. And so on. The smaller scales seem to correspond to the absence of the lighter cathode rays.”
Sam laughed. “That’s crazy. How does that make sense?” All else being equal, creatures of different scales weighed more or less the same. He’d even sat on a seesaw with Yukio in kindergarten, to prove to the astonished onlookers that his half-sized friend was close to a perfect balance for him.
Yukio said, “Chey came up with an answer to that. She developed a model of atomic structure where the size of an atom depends on the mass of the lightest cathode rays it contains. Even the heaviest cathode rays are much less massive than the lightest atoms, so most of the mass must come from the positively charged nucleus. But then the ‘leptons’ – that’s what Chey called the varieties of cathode rays, because they’re so much lighter than the nucleus – the leptons orbit farther away from the nucleus if they’re lighter, in inverse proportion to their mass. So long as you have some of the very lightest leptons in an atom, it will belong to Scale Zero ... but if you only have leptons that are at least twice as heavy, the atom will be about the half the size.”
Sam could see how that would fit in with Ongweso’s results, but that didn’t make it any more reasonable. “Why should something lighter orbit further out? The planets don’t orbit the sun in order of their mass!”
“No.” Yukio grimaced. “This is where the physics gets strange. The leptons are actually more like waves, which need to wrap around the nucleus, than planets going around the sun. And their wavelength depends on their momentum, which depends on their mass. Heavier leptons have shorter wavelengths, so you can wrap their waves tighter, keeping them closer to the nucleus. I know, it sounds bizarre. But we’ve known for ages that light of shorter wavelengths carries more energy. The same principle applies to leptons. People have even carried out diffraction experiments – bouncing leptons off crystals and looking at the patterns they make – and the results are consistent with Chey’s hypothesis. Heavier leptons have shorter wavelengths. That’s where all the differences in scale come from: from differences in mass, in particles so light we hardly notice their different masses when they’re confined to atoms.”
Sam said, “I think I’d need a second lifetime to really take this all in. But are you getting any closer to telling me why you’ve stopped using vacuum tubes? Notwithstanding how many exciting new kinds of rays they can generate?”
Yukio said, “I know, it’s disappointing that we couldn’t just harness the heavier leptons themselves, somehow. But instead, Chey’s ideas opened up an entirely new field. By understanding the kind of energy levels that leptons can have, people figured out how to replace a whole vacuum tube with a few tiny specks of different materials, sandwiched together. They’re called transistors, and they let you build amplifiers that are much smaller, and use much less power, than any of the old devices.” He held his hands up, maybe twenty millimeters apart. “Even in D5, we can build radios about that big now.”
