‘Now.’ He tapped the little ‘Screen. ‘Look at the picture quality. Some of these images are from handheld cams, some from drones. All taken within ten minutes of the first reported outbreak by a local news agency. And here’s the problem.’ Hiram touched the comer of the image with his fingernail. It bore a logo: ENO, the Earth News Online network, one of Hiram’s bitterest rivals in the news-gathering field. Hiram said, ‘We tried to strike a deal with the local agency, but ENO scooped us.’ He looked at his sons. ‘This happens all the time. In fact, the bigger I get, the more sharp little critters like ENO snap at my heels.
‘I keep camera crews and stringers all around the world, at considerable expense. I have local agents on every street comer across the planet. But we can’t be everywhere. And if we aren’t there it can take hours, days even to get a crew in place. In the twenty-four-hour news business, believe me, being a minute late is fatal.’
David frowned. ‘I don’t understand. You’re talking about competitive advantage? People are dying here, right in front of your eyes.’
‘People die all the time,’ said Hiram harshly. ‘People die in wars over resources, like in Cairo here, or over fine religious or ethnic differences, or because some bloody typhoon or flood or drought hits them as the climate goes crazy, or they just plain die. I can’t change that. If I don’t show it, somebody else will. I’m not here to argue morality. What I’m concerned about is the future of my business. And right now I’m losing out. And that’s why I need you. Both of you.’
Bobby said bluntly, ‘First tell us about our mothers.’
David held his breath.
Hiram gulped his coffee. He said slowly, ‘All right. But there really isn’t much to tell. Eve – David’s mother – was my first wife.’
‘And your first fortune,’ David said dryly. Hiram shrugged. ‘We used Eve’s inheritance as seedcom money to start the business. It’s important that you understand, David. I never ripped off your mother. In the early days we were partners. We had a kind of long range business plan. I remember we wrote it out on the back of a menu at our wedding reception … We hit every bloody one of those targets, and more. We multiplied your mothers fortune tenfold. And we had you.’
‘But you had an affair, and your marriage broke up,’ David said.
Hiram eyed David. ‘How judgmental you are. Just like your mother.’
‘Just tell us. Dad,’ Bobby pressed.
Hiram nodded. ‘Yes, I had an affair. With your mother, Bobby. Heather, she was called. I never meant it to be this way … David, my relationship with Eve had been failing for a long time. That damn religion of hers.’
‘So you threw her out.’
‘She tried to throw me out – I wanted us to come to a settlement, to be civilized about it. In the end she ran out on me – taking you with her.’
David leaned forward. ‘But you cut her out of your business interests. A business you had built on her money.’
Hiram shrugged. ‘I told you I wanted a settlement. She wanted it all. We couldn’t compromise.’ His eyes hardened. ‘I wasn’t about to give up everything I’d built up. Not on the whim of some religion-crazed nut. Even if she was my wife, your mother. When she lost her all-or-nothing suit, she went to France with you, and disappeared off the face of the Earth. Or tried to.’ He smiled, ‘It wasn’t hard to track you down.’ Hiram reached for his arm, twit David pulled back. ‘David, you never knew it, but I’ve been there for you. I found ways to, umm, help you out, without your mother knowing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say you owe everything you have to me, but – ‘
David felt anger blaze. ‘What makes you think I wanted your help?’
Bobby said, ‘Where’s your mother now?’
David tried to calm down. ‘She died. Cancer. It could have been easier for her. We couldn’t afford – ‘
‘She wouldn’t let me help her,’ Hiram said. ‘Even at the end she pushed me away.’
David said, ‘What do you expect? You took everything she had from her.’
Hiram shook his head. ‘She took something more important from me. You.’
‘And so,’ Bobby said coldly, ‘you focused your ambition on me.’
Hiram shrugged. ‘What can I say? Bobby, I gave you everything – everything – I’d have given both of you. I prepared you as best I could.’
‘Prepared!’ David laughed, bemused. ‘What kind of word is that?’
Hiram thumped the table. ‘If Joe Kennedy can do it, why not Hiram Patterson? Don’t you see, boys? There’s no limit to what we can achieve, if we work together … ‘
‘You are talking about politics?’ David eyed Bobby’s sleek, puzzled face. ‘Is that what you intend for Bobby? Perhaps the Presidency itself?’ He laughed. ‘You are exactly as I imagined you. Father.’
‘And how’s that?’
‘Arrogant. Manipulative.’
Hiram was growing angry. ‘And you are just as I expected. As pompous and pious as your mother.’
Bobby was staring at his father, bemused.
David stood. ‘Perhaps we have said enough.’
Hiram’s anger dissipated immediately. ‘No. Wait. I’m sorry. You’re right. I didn’t drag you all the way over here to fight with you. Sit down and hear me out. Please.’
David remained on his feet. ‘What do you want of me?’
Hiram sat back and studied him. ‘I want you to build a bigger wormhole for me.’
‘How much bigger?’
Hiram took a breath. ‘Big enough to look through.’
There was a long silence.
David sat down, shaking his head. ‘That’s – ‘
‘Impossible? I know. But let me tell you anyhow.’ Hiram got up and walked around the cluttered cafeteria, gesturing as he talked, animated, excited. ‘Suppose I could immediately open up a wormhole from my newsroom in Seattle direct to this story event in Cairo – and suppose that wormhole was wide enough to transmit pictures from the event – I could feed images from anywhere in the world straight into the network, with virtually no delay. Right? Think about it. I could fire my stringers and remote crews, reducing my costs to a fraction. I could even set up some kind of automated search facility, continually keeping watch through short-lived wormholes, waiting for the next story to break, wherever and whenever. There’s really no limit.’
Bobby smiled weakly. ‘Dad, they’d never scoop you again.’
‘Bloody right.’ Hiram turned to David. ‘That’s the dream. Now tell me why it’s impossible.’
David frowned. ‘It’s hard to know where to start. Right now you can establish metastable DataPipes between two fixed points. That’s a considerable achievement in itself. But you need a massive piece of machinery at each end to anchor each wormhole mouth. Correct? Now you want to open up a stable wormhole mouth at the remote end, at your news story’s location, without the benefit of any kind of anchor.’
‘Correct.’
‘Well, that’s the first thing that’s impossible, as I’m sure your technical people have been telling you.’
‘So they have. What else?’
‘You want to use these wormholes to transmit visible light photons. Now, quantum-foam wormholes come in at the Planck-Wheeler length, which is ten-to-minus-thirty-five meters. You’ve managed to expand them up through twenty orders of magnitude to make them big enough to pass gamma-ray photons. Very high frequency, very short wavelength.’
‘Yeah. We use the gamma rays to carry digitized data streams, which.’
‘But the wavelength of your gamma rays is around a million times smaller than visible-light wavelengths. The mouths of your second-generation wormholes would have to be around a micron across at least.’ David eyed his father. ‘I take it you’ve had your engineers trying to achieve exactly that. And it doesn’t work.’
Hiram sighed. ‘We’ve actually managed to pump in enough Casimir energy to rip open wormholes that wide. But you get some kind of feedback effect which causes the damn things to collapse.’
David nodded. ‘They call it Wheeler instability. Wormholes aren’t naturally stable. A wormhole mouth’s gravity pulls in photons, accelerates them to high energy, and that energized radiation bombards the throat and causes it to pinch off. It’s the effect you have to counter with Casimir-effect negative energy, to keep open even the smallest wormholes.’
Hiram walked to the window of the little cafeteria. Beyond, David could see the hulking form of the detector complex at the heart of the facility. ‘I have some good minds here. But these people are experimentalists. All they can do is trap and measure what happens when it all goes wrong. What we need is to beef up the theory, to go beyond the state of the art. Which is where you come in.’ He turned. ‘David, I want you to take a sabbatical from Oxford and come work with me on this.’ Hiram put his arm around David’s shoulders; his flesh was strong and warm, its pressure overpowering. ‘Think of how this could turn out. Maybe you’ll pick up the Nobel Prize in Physics, while simultaneously I’ll eat up ENO and those other yapping dogs who run at my heels. Father and son together. Sons. What do you think?’