Analog SFF, May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  * * * *

  Barges might not have been included in the motorboat ban, but let me tell you, they kick up one hell of a wake. A couple minutes after this one passed, we got bounced around real good. Maybe that's what gave me the idea when, half an hour later, another came by, heading downriver.

  “Free ride!” I called. “Follow me!”

  This one's wake was magnificent: a four-foot crest that lifted you, then let you slide down ahead of it with only a minimum of paddling to keep station on the wave. There's nothing on a whitewater stream to match it because the source is moving. By angling the right way on the wave, it looked like you could go quite a ways downriver before it carried you too close to shore. I was going damn near seven or eight miles an hour, which, in a kayak, feels like flying.

  Behind me, Joe was doing the same, about fifty meters back. Cass and Parnell were also aboard the wave, though they were running directly with it, rather than angling downstream. Drat. I wasn't sure whether this was a problem inherent in the canoe, or if they just didn't have the skill to keep it pointed in the right direction without swamping. Either way, their joy-whoops were steadily falling astern, and Hamilton was angling with them, not us.

  I glanced at Joe and we exchanged nods: the type that outdoor folk of all stripes know—mountaineers, fishermen, boaters, SCUBA divers. Wordless communication. In this case: Damn, time to bail.

  Unwilling just to drop behind the crest and watch it move on without us, we changed angle and started running toward shore, like the others. About halfway there, though, strange V-shaped ripples started appearing near the base of the wave.

  In whitewater, Vs are produced by current flowing over rocks. Here, the only current was from the wake, which was momentarily revealing something solid, not far beneath the surface.

  “Cripes!” I yelled, backpaddling to let the wave run out from under me. But I was still moving quickly when I slammed into something solid, hard enough to rattle my teeth. Another wave passed, bashing me into another object, then another. Then the coffee-colored backwaters were still, with no current to mark the location of whatever the hell it was I'd been playing bumper cars with.

  Then Joe was beside me. “Damn,” he said, bracing on his paddle and leaning sideways to inspect for damage. “There aren't supposed to be any of those left.”

  “What was it?”

  “Stump farm.”

  Obviously, that wasn't meant to be taken literally. And for once, I actually managed to keep my mouth shut.

  Joe had finished his inspection. “Years ago,” he said, “when they first dammed the river, they flooded a lot of bottomland. Before the water rose, they cut back the trees, right at a level where you couldn't see them. But that was a long time ago. You'd have thought they'd all have rotted by now.”

  “Lewis and Clark found something similar on the Columbia River,” I said without thinking. “Dead stumps left underwater when a landslide created a pond that raised the water level. They turned out to be hundreds of years old.”

  Joe had that odd look again, and I realized there was no way Anthony should have known that.

  “I read it somewhere,” I said, though it sounded unconvincing, even to me. “Probably on the Web.” Which was simply digging myself deeper because as far as I'd been able to tell, Anthony didn't read about anything, anywhere, if it wasn't about baseball.

  Joe started to say something, but I was saved by a shout from upstream.

  In the excitement, I'd forgotten the others. Unlike Joe and me, they hadn't recognized the danger and had blithely surfed into the heart of the stump farm. Or at least as far into it as luck permitted. Hamilton was in the water, swim-pushing his kayak toward shore in search of a shallow place to climb back aboard.

  The canoe was also swamped, with Parnell clinging to its side. Nearby, Cass was thrashing violently, ignoring the paddle Parnell was extending toward him in the hope of pulling him back to the boat. Why is it that non-swimmers in canoes never wear their damn lifejackets? Or maybe it's something about church outings. Back home there have been lots of famous ones that ended in disasters: drowning, lost in the woods, freezing in blizzards. Trapped in rainstorms too, which was something I'd been trying not to think about. Church is about trust, but outdoor survival is about presuming that nature's out to get you, even more than the parking regs back at Redwood Coast. It's also about thinking before you leap, which none of us had done before riding that wave toward shallow water, which means that I was as guilty as anyone, even if a stump farm was something I'd never have imagined.

  All of that came to me later. At the time, I was paddling as hard as I could toward Cass and Parnell, banging into a couple more stumps in the process.

  It turned out that Cass wasn't drowning, at least not yet. Rather, he was writhing in agony while trying to stay afloat with one hand clamped under his armpit. He barely acknowledged my shout, and whatever he'd done to himself hurt enough that he wasn't much help when I pulled him partway onto the bow of my boat.

  What he'd done turned out to be something awful to his hand: something that left one finger bent backward at an angle that made my stomach heave when Joe cajoled him into holding it out for inspection.

  Joe looked at the hand, then glanced at the clouds, which were now darker than anything I'd ever seen back home. It didn't take a genius to deduce that we were in for one hell of a lightning storm. If we didn't reach the take-out point by the time it struck, the only way to avoid being fried would be to beach the boats and hide under the canoe, with no warm clothing other than my solitary fleece. Not a pleasant prospect.

  Joe didn't look any happier than I felt. “Well,” he said to Cass, “I have good news and bad news.” He shifted his grip on his friend's arm. “The good news is that this is easy to fix. The bad news—” he yanked hard, producing a sickening click that barely preceded Cass's scream “—is that fixing it hurts a bit. How is it now?”

  Cass held it up. It looked like a hand again, though the knuckle was already starting to swell. He flexed it, gingerly. “Not great, but a lot better.”

  “Good. You'll need to get it checked out when we get home. Meanwhile, anybody got an ibuprofen?”

  Of course not. This was a church group. Nobody'd thought to bring anything.

  “How about a satphone?” I asked. I'd left Anthony's at home because I'd not wanted to be pestered by his baseball buddies.

  Joe looked pained. “It's my day off.”

  “I've got one, Parnell said. “Except...”

  Except it had been in a bag that had also contained his lunch, sunscreen, and wallet. Luckily for the wallet, he'd managed to recover the bag when the boat capsized. Unluckily for the phone, he'd not closed the bag after eating lunch.

  * * * *

  It wasn't until later that I realized we really were in life-threatening danger. At the time, I just thought we were in trouble. Though I certainly didn't give a Red's ass for our chances of getting out ahead of the storm. Or a Blue's behind, or whatever they say around here. It's weird: one of the things I could have been doing this month was making a list of Red phrases to entertain the folks back home. But except for a few dumb lines on the phone from Anthony's pub buddies, I'd not heard much—though I'm sure Anthony could be just as creative about it as my friends and I were back home, talking about Reds.

  Our main problem was that Cass couldn't paddle. He tried, but his hand was continuing to swell, and by the time we got the boats bailed out, he couldn't do much but flail around, one handed. That left Parnell as the sole paddler and, well, the kindest word for Parnell's canoe steering was “erratic.”

  “Sorry, guys,” he said, “but I haven't done this since Boy Scouts. And I wasn't any good at it, back then.”

  “That's okay,” Joe said because that's what you say in such situations, although I could see him checking the sky again. It had passed through “dark” and was heading for blue-black. At least the storm was still keeping its distance. Some quirk of meteorology must be holding it
at bay, though it seemed to be taking advantage of it to grow ever more intense. You hear about these Red-state thunderstorms on the news, all the time. Sometimes it seems as though they're magnetically drawn to trailer parks or other vulnerable places—and here we were, on a mile-wide river, with the mother of all storms waiting to pounce.

  The solution was one Joe and I cooked up together. I thought it was mostly his idea; he claimed it was mine. The canoe had a line attached to its bow and stern, as did our kayaks, presumably for tying up to nonexistent docks. We removed the spare ropes, and Parnell, who might not have done well at canoeing but had clearly paid attention when the Scouts were talking about knots, formed them into a sort of Y-shape that Joe and I could use to tow the canoe. I won't say it was fun, but with Parnell paddling and Cass contributing what he could, we actually made pretty good progress, easily keeping pace with Hamilton, who kept asking what he could do to help.

  Amazingly, the storm continued to hold off, though by the time we finally reached the take-out point, the first fat drops were splatting the river and the sky had moved beyond blue-black to a weird shade of green. Or maybe my eyes were deceiving me. Can a sky be green?

  We'd only left one car at the take-out: Joe's. Parnell's was back at the park where we'd camped last night, a distressing distance away. In theory, we could all have fit in Joe's car, but Blue state or Red state, you don't leave boats unattended; there's just too much chance of them disappearing.

  I'm not a martyr type, but I was the only one with warm clothing so there was only one reasonable option: I stayed, while the others piled into Joe's car. It was while they were gone that I realized the extent of the danger we'd been in. As the storm drew ever nearer, the temperature plummeted—enough that I was beginning to get seriously chilled, fleece and windbreaker notwithstanding. Before the night was over, I would later learn, the mercury would drop nearly to freezing, breaking a 112-year-old record.

  * * * *

  Needless to say, when the others returned, we wasted no time lashing the boats to their carriers. Then Cass and Parnell waved good-bye and headed for home, while I rode with Joe and Hamilton, munching potato chips and other leftover camping food.

  Five minutes later, the sky exploded. Lightning forked, cloud to cloud. First one bolt, then more, connecting to each other until they ran in circles overhead, like a dog chasing its tail—one circuit, two, then three before the thunder began, following the same loop until the entire sky merged into one continuous growl.

  “What the hell was that?” I said. Back home, we don't get many thunderstorms, and never anything like this. “Does it often do things like that around here?”

  “Chain lightning,” Hamilton said, though I was pretty sure he was guessing. “I've heard of it, but never seen it.”

  Joe was yet again looking at me oddly. “Around here?”

  Oh, crap. “Just a figure of speech.”

  “'Figure of speech,’ my eye.” He flipped the windshield wipers to max as the heavens opened in a downpour so hard it was difficult to see the lane markers. “You've been acting weird for days.” Now Hamilton was looking at me, too.

  “Just not feeling myself—” But Joe clearly wasn't buying it.

  Hell. One of the things I'd always been told about Reds was that power was the only thing they respected. And while I was no longer so sure they were all that different from ordinary folks, that didn't mean directness might not be appropriate. As with anyone else, I suppose.

  “Well, actually, I'm an Exchange,” I said. “They sent me here to see how the other half lives.”

  I'd expected anger, but instead got nods. “I should have known it was too good,” Joe said.

  “Huh?”

  “Anthony's a screw-up. Give him half a chance, and all he does is goof off. Jeesh, I hope you don't judge all of us by him.”

  For some reason, those words stung. But that made no sense because he was talking about Anthony, not me.

  “When, and for how long?”

  I told him and he nodded again. “I remember that day. You actually got that foundation done before quitting time.” Which was ironic because if I'd known what was expected, I'd have fallen right into slacker mode—and never have found out how good it felt to get a bag of shingles to the roof.

  Joe hesitated. “And you've been civil to Roy.”

  “Why shouldn't I be?” Roy was another guy on the crew. I didn't know much about him because he'd been kind of quiet, though now that I thought about it, Anthony's subconscious did seem to have been urging me to keep my distance. I'd only talked to him once or twice, and the only thing I remembered was being startled to discover that he wasn't a fan of movies where everything went boom every couple of minutes. Not what I'd have expected from a Red.

  “Because Roy's gay. Anthony's not particularly tolerant of, shall we say, differences. I don't know how many times Kurt's damn near fired you ... sorry, him.”

  The sky was still growling and now it unleashed another series of flashes nearly as spectacular as the first.

  “Yipes,” Hamilton said. “That's not good.”

  “You're not kidding,” Joe said. He shot me another glance. “Welcome to Iowa.”

  * * * *

  With roofing crew over, I didn't see as much of Joe in the next few days. Then it was time to report back to the Exchange agent in Cantril.

  It's odd, but I thought the Exchange was supposed to purple-ize the country by mixing Red and Blue. But I don't remember talking politics with anyone. I mean, I kind of liked some of those guys, but we had our differences. I bet there are a hundred and one topics on which we'd still cancel each other's votes. So what's the point?

  Before I left, though, Joe and I traded phones and e-mails. Maybe he'll get out my way sometime and I can introduce him to hiking, mountain style. Or maybe the coast. He'd love them both, and levelheaded backcountry companions are hard to find. But even if he does come out, we'd never talk politics. I'm still Blue; he's still Red. Nothing about my month in Iowa changed that. As I said, we didn't even talk about it.

  When I got home, I pretty quickly learned that it had been the same for my friends’ dealings with Anthony. No politics: just a lot of inconsequential gabbing.

  “We figured it out pretty quickly,” my coworker Becca said. “He was spending breaks with his nose buried in the sports section. After he ‘fessed up, he dragged us all to a baseball game. I didn't even know we had a team. Double A, I think it's called. After that, all he talked was baseball, but who'd have believed it could be so interesting?”

  So I repeat: what's the point?

  Copyright © 2007 Richard A. Lovett

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE UNIVERSE AS WATERMELON

  by JOHN G. CRAMER

  Nicholas Copernicus, who first proposed the heretical theory of a heliocentric universe with the Sun at its center and the Earth demoted to just one of the planets in orbit around it, was absolutely certain that the orbits of the planets must be perfect circles. They had to be, because they were the creations of a perfect God, and a circle is the most perfect of geometrical objects. When Johannes Kepler, after spending most of his career trying to make sense of the meticulous planetary observations of Tycho Brahe, concluded that the orbits of the planets were not circles but ellipses, the discovery sent shock waves through the community of natural philosophers. The discovery led Newton and others to arrive at the inverse square law of gravitational attraction.

  A paradigm shift similar to this one has just occurred in observational cosmology. The “surface” from which the cosmic background radiation was emitted may not be a sphere. This discovery is the subject of this column.

  * * * *

  About 400,000 years after the initial Big Bang, when the era of exponential inflation was over, things settled down to a slower and steadier rate of expansion. As more space became available for the energy in it, the universe was cooling things down. The early universe was
a nearly perfect “liquid plasma” saturated with energy, in which quarks behaved as free particles. As the cooling progressed, the only strongly interacting particles around, quarks, organized themselves into composite mesons, protons, and neutrons. By some process that remains obscure, there was a slight excess of protons and electrons over their antimatter equivalents (antiprotons and positrons). During the high-density stages of the early universe, essentially all of the antimatter paired off with its matter counterparts to annihilate, leaving behind the slight excess of matter particles as “the only game in town.” The cooling universe was a “soup” dominated by free electrons and protons. In this environment, a photon of light could travel only a short distance without being absorbed by interacting with one of the free charged particles.

  Later, the negative electrons and positive protons tended to pair off, forming neutral hydrogen atoms. In the process, the dominance of free charged particles, which easily absorb photons, was being replaced by light-transparent neutral atoms. The “soup” of the universe was changing from murky black to crystal clear.

  The photons that were present in that era had energies that were characteristic of light emitted from an object (the universe) with a temperature of about 2,900 K. (Here, K means “kelvin” and specifies the absolute temperature in Celsius degrees above absolute zero.) As long as the universe was murky black, they were caught in a “ping-pong match” of repeated emission and re-absorption. However, the growing transparency of the universe released them from this trap, and they became free photons. Those photons have been traveling through the universe ever since, and we detect them today as the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB).

  However, as the universe expands and space itself stretches, the wavelengths of these CMB photons were also stretched until they are microwave photons characteristic of a very cold object with a temperature of 2.73 K instead of visible light photons characteristic of a hot object with a temperature of 2,900 K. We observe these CMB photons today as microwaves emitted from a “surface” that has not existed for 13 billion years. Parts of that surface were a bit hotter than other parts, and these tiny energy variations show up as variations in the intensities of these microwaves, revealing the structure of the hot surface of the universe at 400,000 years of age.