“Your clothes,” Patil said abruptly.
“What?”
“They mark you as a Westerner. Quickly!”
Patil’s hands, light as birds in the quilted soft light, were already plucking at his coat, his shirt. Clay was taken aback at this abruptness. He hesitated, then struggled out of the dirty garments, pulling his loose slacks down over his shoes. He handed his bundled clothes to Patil, who snatched them away without a word.
“You’re welcome,” Clay said. Patil took no notice, just thrust a wad of tan cotton at him. The man’s eyes jumped at each distant sound in the storage room, darting, suspecting every pile of dusty bags.
Clay struggled into the pants and rough shirt. They looked dingy in the wan yellow glow of a single distant fluorescent tube.
“Not the reception I’d expected,” Clay said, straightening the baggy pants and pulling at the rough drawstring.
“These are not good times for scientists in my country, Dr. Clay,” Patil said bitingly. His voice carried that odd lilt that echoed both the Raj and Cambridge.
“Who’re you afraid of?”
“Those who hate Westerners and their science.”
“They said in Washington—”
“We are about great matters, Professor Clay. Please cooperate, please.” Patil’s lean face showed its bones starkly, as though energies pressed outward. Promontories of bunched muscle stretched a mottled canvas skin. He started toward a far door without another word, carrying Clay’s overnight bag and jacket.
“Say, where’re we—”
Patil swung open a sheet-metal door and beckoned. Clay slipped through it and into the moist wealth of night. His feet scraped on a dirty sidewalk beside a black tar road. The door hinge squealed behind them, attracting the attention of a knot of men beneath a vibrant yellow streetlight nearby.
The bleached fluorescence of the airport terminal was now a continent away. Beneath a line of quarter-ton trucks huddled figures slept. In the astringent street-lamp glow he saw a decrepit green Korean Tochat van parked at the curb.
“In!” Patil whispered.
The men under the streetlight started walking toward them, calling out hoarse questions.
Clay yanked open the van’s sliding door and crawled into the second row of seats. A fog of unknown pungent smells engulfed him. The driver, a short man, hunched over the wheel. Patil sprang into the front seat and the van ground away, its low gear whining.
Shouts. A stone thumped against the van roof. Pebbles rattled at the back. They accelerated, the engine clattering. A figure loomed up from the shifting shadows and flung muck against the window near Clay’s face. He jerked back at the slap of it. “Damn!”
They plowed through a wide puddle of dirty rainwater. The engine sputtered and for a moment Clay was sure it would die. He looked out the rear window and saw vague forms running after them. Then the engine surged again and they shot away. They went two blocks through hectic traffic. Clay tried to get a clear look at India outside, but all he could see in the starkly shadowed street were the crisscrossings of three-wheeled taxis and human-drawn rickshaws. He got an impression of incessant activity, even in this desolate hour. Vehicles leaped out of the murk as headlights swept across them and then vanished utterly into the moist shadows again.
They suddenly swerved around a corner beneath spreading, gloomy trees. The van jolted into deep potholes and jerked to a stop. “Out!” Patil called.
Clay could barely make out a second van at the curb ahead. It was blue and caked with mud, but even in the dim light would not be confused with their green one. A rotting fetid reek filled his nose as he got out the side door, as if masses of overripe vegetation loomed in the shadows. Patil tugged him into the second van.
In a few seconds they went surging out through a narrow, brick-lined alley. “Look, what—”
“Please, quiet,” Patil said primly. “I am watching carefully now to be certain that we are not being followed.”
They wound through a shantytown warren for several minutes. Their headlights picked up startled eyes that blinked from what Clay at first had taken to be bundles of rags lying against the shacks. They seemed impossibly small even to be children. Huddled against decaying tin lean-tos, the dim forms often did not stir even as the van splashed dirty water on them from potholes.
Clay began, “Look, I understand the need for—”
“I apologize for our rude methods, Dr. Clay,” Patil said. He gestured at the driver. “May I introduce Dr. Singh?”
Singh was similarly gaunt and intent, but with bushy hair and a thin, pointed nose. He jerked his head aside to peer at Clay, nodded twice like a puppet on strings, and then quickly stared back at the narrow lane ahead. Singh kept the van at a steady growl, abruptly yanking it around corners. A wooden cart lurched out of their way, its driver swearing in a strident singsong.
“Welcome to India,” Singh said with reedy solemnity. “I am afraid circumstances are not the best.”
“Uh, right. You two are heads of the project, they told me at the NSF.”
“Yes,” Patil said archly, “the project which officially no longer exists and unofficially is a brilliant success. It is amusing!”
“Yeah,” Clay said cautiously, “we’ll see.”
“Oh, you will see,” Singh said excitedly. “We have the events! More all the time.”
Patil said precisely, “We would not have suggested that your National Science Foundation send an observer to confirm our findings unless we believed them to be of the highest importance.”
“You’ve seen proton decay?”
Patil beamed. “Without doubt.”
“Damn.”
“Exactly.”
“What mode?”
“The straightforward pion and positron decay products.”
Clay smiled, reserving judgment. Something about Patil’s almost prissy precision made him wonder if this small, beleaguered team of Indian physicists might actually have brought it off. An immense long shot, of course, but possible. There were much bigger groups of particle physicists in Europe and the U.S. who had tried to detect proton decay using underground swimming pools of pure water. Those experiments had enjoyed all the benefits of the latest electronics. Clay had worked on the big American project in a Utah salt mine, before lean budgets and lack of results closed it down. It would be galling if this lone, underfunded Indian scheme had finally done it. Nobody at the NSF believed the story coming out of India.
Patil smiled at Clay’s silence, a brilliant slash of white in the murk. Their headlights picked out small panes of glass stuck seemingly at random in nearby hovels, reflecting quick glints of yellow back into the van. The night seemed misty; their headlights forked ahead. Clay thought a soft rain had started outside, but then he saw that thousands of tiny insects darted into their headlights. Occasionally big ones smacked against the windshield.
Patil carefully changed the subject. “I…believe you will pass unnoticed, for the most part.”
“I look Indian?”
“I hope you will not take offense if I remark that you do not. We requested an Indian, but your NSF said they did not have anyone qualified.”
“Right. Nobody who could hop on a plane, anyway.” Or would, he added to himself.
“I understand. You are a compromise. If you will put this on…” Patil handed Clay a floppy khaki hat. “It will cover your curly hair. Luckily, your nose is rather more narrow than I had expected when the NSF cable announced they were sending a Negro.”
“Got a lot of white genes in it, this nose,” Clay said evenly.
“Please, do not think I am being racist. I simply wished to diminish the chances of you being recognized as a Westerner in the countryside.”
“Think I can pass?”
“At a distance, yes.”
“Be tougher at the site?”
“Yes. There are ‘celebrants,’ as they term themselves, at the mine.”
“How’ll we get in?”
&
nbsp; “A ruse we have devised.”
“Like that getaway back there? That was pretty slick.”
Singh sent them jouncing along a rutted lane. Withered trees leaned against the pale stucco two-story buildings that lined the lane like children’s blocks lined up not quite correctly. “Men in customs, they would give word to people outside. If you had gone through with the others, a different reception party would have been waiting for you.”
“I see. But what about my bags?”
Patil had been peering forward at the gloomy jumble of buildings. His head jerked around to glare at Clay. “You were not to bring more than your carry-on bag!”
“Look, I can’t get by on that. Chrissake, that’d give me just one change of clothes—”
“You left bags there?”
“Well, yeah, I had just one—”
Clay stopped when he saw the look on the two men’s faces.
Patil said with strained clarity, “Your bags, they had identification tags?”
“Sure, airlines make you—”
“They will bring attention to you. There will be inquiries. The devotees will hear of it, inevitably, and know you have entered the country.”
Clay licked his lips. “Hell, I didn’t think it was so important.”
The two lean Indians glanced at each other, their faces taking on a narrowing, leaden cast. “Dr. Clay,” Patil said stiffly, “the ‘celebrants’ believe, as do many, that Westerners deliberately destroyed our crops with their biotechnology.”
“Japanese companies’ biologists did that, I thought,” Clay said diplomatically.
“Perhaps. Those who disturb us at the Kolar gold mine make no fine distinctions between biologists and physicists. They believe that we are disturbing the very bowels of the earth, helping to further the destruction, bringing on the very end of the world itself. Surely you can see that in India, the mother country of religious philosophy, such matters are important.”
“But your work, hell, it’s not a matter of life or death or anything.”
“On the contrary, the decay of the proton is precisely an issue of death.”
Clay settled back in his seat, puzzled, watching the silky night stream by, cloaking vague forms in its shadowed mysteries.
Clay insisted on the telephone call. A wan winter sun had already crawled partway up the sky before he awoke, and the two Indian physicists wanted to leave immediately. They had stopped while still in Bangalore, holing up in the cramped apartment of one of Patil’s graduate students. As Clay took his first sip of tea, two other students had turned up with his bag, retrieved at a cost he never knew. Clay said, “I promised I’d call home. Look, my family’s worried. They read the papers, they know the trouble here.”
Shaking his head slowly, Patil finished a scrap of curled brown bread that appeared to be his only breakfast. His movements had a smooth liquid inertia, as if the sultry morning air oozed like jelly around him. They were sitting at a low table that had one leg too short; the already rickety table kept lurching, slopping tea into their saucers. Clay had looked for something to prop up the leg, but the apartment was bare, as though no one lived here. They had slept on pallets beneath a single bare bulb. Through the open windows, bare of frames or glass, Clay had gotten fleeting glimpses of the neighborhood—rooms of random clutter, plaster peeling off slumped walls, revealing the thin steel cross-ribs of the buildings, stained windows adorned with gaudy pictures of many-armed gods, already sun-bleached and frayed. Children yelped and cried below, their voices reflected among the odd angles and apertures of the tangled streets, while carts rattled by and bare feet slapped the stones. Students had apparently stood guard last night, though Clay had never seen more than a quick motion in the shadows below as they arrived.
“You ask much of us,” Patil said. By morning light his walnut-brown face seemed gullied and worn. Lines radiated from his mouth toward intense eyes.
Clay sipped his tea before answering. A soft, strangely sweet smell wafted through the open window. They sat well back in the room so nobody could see in from the nearby buildings. He heard Singh tinkering downstairs with the van’s engine. “Okay, it’s maybe slightly risky. But I want my people to know I got here all right.”
“There are few telephones here.”
“I only need one.”
“The system, often it does not work at all.”
“Gotta try.”
“Perhaps you do not understand—”
“I understand damn well that if I can’t even reach my people, I’m not going to hang out here for long. And if I don’t see that your experiment works right, nobody’ll believe you.”
“And your opinion depends upon…?”
Clay ticked off points on his fingers. “On seeing the apparatus. Checking your raw data. Running a trial case to see your system response. Then a null experiment—to verify your threshold level on each detector.” He held up five fingers. “The works.”
Patil said gravely, “Very good. We relish the opportunity to prove ourselves.”
“You’ll get it.” Clay hoped to himself that they were wrong, but he suppressed that. He represented the faltering forefront of particle physics, and it would be embarrassing if a backwater research team had beaten the world. Still, either way, he would end up being the expert on the Kolar program, and that was a smart career move in itself.
“Very well. I must make arrangements for the call, then. But I truly—”
“Just do it. Then we get down to business.”
The telephone was behind two counters and three doors at a Ministry for Controls office. Patil did the bribing and cajoling inside and then brought Clay in from the back of the van. He had been lying down on the back seat so he could not be seen easily from the street. The telephone itself was a heavy black plastic thing with a rotary dial that clicked like a sluggish insect as it whirled. Patil had been on it twice already, clearing international lines through Bombay. Clay got two false rings and a dead line. On the fourth try he heard a faint, somehow familiar buzzing. Then a hollow, distant click.
“Daddy, is that you?” Faint rock music in the background.
“Sure, I just wanted to let you know I got to India okay.”
“Oh, Mommy will be so glad! We heard on the TV last night that there’s trouble over there.”
Startled, Clay asked, “What? Where’s your mother?”
“Getting groceries. She’ll be so mad she missed your call!”
“You tell her I’m fine, okay? But what trouble?”
“Something about a state leaving India. Lots of fighting, John Trimble said on the news.”
Clay never remembered the names of news announcers; he regarded them as faceless nobodies reading prepared scripts, but for his daughter they were the voice of authority. “Where?”
“Uh, the lower part.”
“There’s nothing like that happening here, honey. I’m safe. Tell Mommy.”
“People have ice cream there?”
“Yeah, but I haven’t seen any. You tell your mother what I said, remember? About being safe?”
“Yes, she’s been worried.”
“Don’t worry, Angy. Look, I got to go.” The line popped and hissed ominously.
“I miss you, Daddy.”
“I miss you double that. No, squared.”
She laughed merrily. “I skinned my knee today at recess. It bled so much I had to go to the nurse.”
“Keep it clean, honey. And give your mother my love.”
“She’ll be so mad.”
“I’ll be home soon.”
She giggled and ended with the joke she had been using lately. “G’bye, Daddy. It’s been real.”
Her light laugh trickled into the static, a grace note from a bright land worlds away. Clay chuckled as he replaced the receiver. She cut the last word of “real nice” to make her good-byes hip and sardonic, a mannerism she had heard on television somewhere. An old joke; he had heard that even “groovy” was coming back in.
Clay smiled and pulled his hat down further and went quickly out into the street where Patil was waiting. India flickered at the edge of his vision, the crowds a hovering presence.
They left Bangalore in two vans. Graduate students drove the green Tochat from the previous night. He and Patil and Singh took the blue one, Clay again keeping out of sight by lying on the back seat. The day’s raw heat rose around them like a shimmering lake of light.
They passed through lands leached of color. Only gray stubble grew in the fields. Trees hung limply, their limbs bowing as though exhausted. Figures in rags huddled for shade. A few stirred, eyes white in the shadows, as the vans ground past. Clay saw that large boles sat on the branches like gnarled knots with brown sheaths wrapped around the underside.
“Those some of the plant diseases I heard about?” he asked.
Singh pursed his lips. “I fear those are the pouches like those of wasps, as reported in the press.” His watery eyes regarded the withered, graying trees as Patil slowed the car.
“Are they dangerous?” Clay could see yellow sap dripping from the underside of each.
“Not until they ripen,” Singh said. “Then the assassins emerge.”
“They look pretty big already.”
“They are said to be large creatures, but of course there is little experience.”
Patil downshifted and they accelerated away with an occasional sputtering misfire. Clay wondered whether they had any spare spark plugs along. The fields on each side of the road took on a dissolute and shredded look.
“Did the genetech experiments cause this?” he asked.
Singh nodded. “I believe this emerged from the European programs. First we had their designed plants, but then pests found vulnerability. They sought strains which could protect crops from the new pests. So we got these wasps. I gather that now some error or mutation has made them equally excellent at preying on people and even cows.”
Clay frowned. “The wasps came from the Japanese aid, didn’t they?”
Patil smiled mysteriously. “You know a good deal about our troubles, sir.”
The Best of Gregory Benford Page 22
