The Golden Gate, page 10
Quentin Pinkleberg was an anorexic, self-taught computer geek who collected comic books while he squatted in his parents’ basement. Or he had been, until a video game he developed, which he set in putative subterranean oceans of the moons of Jupiter, caught commercial fire. Nintendo bought Aquanaut, and Hollywood tentpoled a blockbuster movie series around it.
Quentin Pinkleberg had changed his name to fit his fortune and his fame, but he couldn’t change his résumé. He was still a self-taught computer geek who collected comic books. However, he had succeeded Paul Allen as Hat Creek’s principal funding source.
Dr. Chaudhury’s pout was understandable, if uncharitable. It was easier for Hat Creek’s distinguished but impoverished astronomers to accept Quentin’s money than it was to accept Quentin.
Kate shook her head in answer. “I’m not here to interview Quentin again. I just want to see whether he can help me with an unrelated story.”
Kate pointed at one kitchen wall, which functioned as a bulletin board, labelled “EXOPLANET ROUNDUP.” The wall was push-pinned with printouts of artists’ conceptions of planets that orbited stars beyond the solar system, grouped around an autographed photo of Mr. Spock.
Kate asked, “But is there a story here I should do? Everybody loves to read about aliens.”
Andrea smiled the smile of an unexpectedly acknowledged stepchild. “Unfortunately, there’s not much that’s concrete enough to love yet.”
“Try me.”
The astronomer stood and walked to the wall. “When I was a kid, the only way astronomers could search for life outside the solar system was to point radio telescopes at random stars in a sky full of billions of billions of them.” Chaudhury shrugged. “Then they just listened for years for some sign of intelligent life, without result. Does that sound like a waste of time?”
Kate said, “It sounds like being a political reporter in Washington.”
“The problem was that if extrasolar planets were out there orbiting stars, the planets weren’t big enough or bright enough to see from Earth. And the Milky Way alone contains at least a hundred billion, and probably multiples of a hundred billion, stars.”
“Big haystack, small needle?”
Dr. Chaudhury nodded. “But by 2009, optical astronomy had telescopes orbiting outside the atmosphere. They still couldn’t see planets. But they could detect the drop in a star’s brightness when a planet transited the star’s surface and cast a shadow.” The astronomer passed her hand between Kate’s face and the flame of the candle on the table between them, circled her hand around behind the candle flame, then obscured the flame again. “Like this, but the shadow’s the size of a rice grain, not a hand. We’ve improved our methods. Now we can identify Earth-sized planets that are neither too hot or too cold for liquid water. And spectroscopy’s going to let us spot other telltales. Plants aren’t the only way to generate atmospheric free oxygen, but if we find some, eyebrows will raise.”
Kate swung her arm at the wall. “Wow. All of these?”
Andrea laughed and shook her head. “No. There isn’t a wall big enough for all the earthlikes anymore.” She stepped to the wall and tapped her index finger on a yellowed sheet showing a blue-brown ball. “Kepler 186f. This was the first habitable-zone Earthlike planet NASA identified. That was in 2014. A year later, we had eight confirmed Earthlikes and we were impressed. But Kate, since then we’ve found so many Earthlikes that we estimate twenty billion Earthlikes are orbiting yellow suns, and twice that number are orbiting red dwarf suns, like Kepler 186f does. To say nothing of brown dwarf stars and Earthlike moons that orbit planets, like Quentin’s moons of Jupiter.”
“But with all those worlds, we haven’t heard anything?”
The astronomer shook her head. “Not a peep. In sixty years of listening. But we haven’t come close to listening to all those places. But now that we know Earthlike planets are a dime a dozen, other civilizations almost certainly are, too.”
Kate narrowed her eyes. “And Quentin Callisto is devoting his life and his fortune to listening?”
Andrea wrinkled her forehead. “We’re grateful to Quentin for his support. But you know Quentin. He’d probably prefer to tell you directly what he expects to do with his life and his fortune.” She eyed the wall clock. “If you drive out to the array now, you should catch him.”
“Thanks.” Kate lifted her cup. “I owe you a drink.”
“No, I owe you one, if you’ll give me a chance to sell you on writing an article about what we do up here. Tomorrow I’m going down to San Francisco to sell SETI to the public with a lecture series. You have my mobile number. Give me a call.”
* * *
Five minutes after Kate left the resident astronomer, she drove out onto the road through the meadow across which were sprinkled the radio telescope dishes of the Allen Telescope Array. A silvery forest of them, each as tall as a two-story house, sprouted from concrete pedestals near and far, each arranged and pointed in directions and at angles that to Kate looked random.
From the telescope grove’s center rose a white fabric box, a tent, big enough to hangar a small blimp. Open at one end, the tent housed telescopes during assembly and maintenance. Inside the tent one of the satellite dishes lay concave side-down, like an inverted saucer.
As Kate stopped her car, a goateed scarecrow, wearing jeans and a blue sweatshirt that flapped on his torso, shambled out from behind the dish, walked toward her, and waved.
He smiled as he peeled off thick wire-rimmed glasses and scrubbed them with his sweatshirt’s hem.
Kate extended her hand and Quentin Callisto shook it. “I liked the story, Kate.”
“So did my editor.” She turned and pointed at the telescope dishes that dotted the meadow. There had been perhaps fifty when she had interviewed Quentin about his foundation’s gift to this program. Today, she stopped counting at seventy. “You’ve been busy.”
He shrugged. “I’m no astronomer. It’s only my money that’s busy.”
“You earned your money.”
He shook his head. “I’m proud of Aquanaut 1.0. But 2.0 and the movies are just corporate crapware. The beauty of this place is the suits can’t get to me up here.” He wrinkled his forehead. “But you did. Why?”
Kate nodded. “I want to ask you about a different matter.”
He frowned. “That Comic Con business was a total case of mistaken identity. I was not the only Klingon in that room.”
“It’s nothing like that. Quentin, somebody told me you knew Manuel Colibri.”
Quentin’s frown deepened. “I heard they found Manny’s car on the bottom of San Francisco Bay.”
“Yes, apparently. How did you know Manny?”
Quentin shifted foot-to-foot.
Most interviewees wanted to tell their stories. The reluctant ones just needed a reason not to hold back.
“Quentin, is there any reason to hold back now?”
“I suppose you’re right.” He wagged his head like it was a balloon on a stick. “People wonder how some penniless geek could develop and market Aquanaut. The answer is it was easy, because Manny paid for it. Not Cardinal Systems. Him, personally. Cardinal used to host a retreat for science fiction writers to get seed ideas. Manny actually approached me because he had read a fan fiction story I had written online called Aquanauts. He thought the idea of civilizations in the aquaspheres of planets and moons would make a cool game. He offered to pay one hundred percent of the initial development, manufacturing, and promotion costs. But I got to keep eighty percent of the venture.” Quentin shrugged. “I made obscene profits. Manny made semi-obscene profits.”
Kate pursed her lips. “Did you keep in touch with him?”
“Sure. He still hosted the meet-and-greets down in the city. The idea was cross-fertilization.”
“Did you ever cross-fertilize about the Methuselarity?”
He cocked his head. “In a way.”
Kate’s heart skipped. “In what way, Quentin?”
Quentin Callisto pointed at the saying printed across his sweatshirt:
186,000 MILES PER SECOND
The speed of light:
It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law!
“As an absolute matter of physical reality, nothing can outrun light. In science fiction, man crosses interstellar space as quickly as sailing ships used to cross oceans. But warp drives, and diving through black holes, and mile-long generation ships, and astronaut crews that travel flash-frozen like corn dogs? Man will never reach the stars in those ways, Kate. The very best we will ever do is accelerate vessels of economically feasible size to a fraction of light speed.”
Kate laid a hand on Quentin’s bony arm. “You said this had to do with life-extension biology, not astronomy.”
“It does. Kate, I’m listening to pick out the Earthlike planet I’m going to visit before I die.”
“You just said we can’t get there from here.”
“No. I said man can’t reach the stars by outrunning light. But a man doesn’t have to outrun light. He just has to outrun death. Once mankind can outrun death, the only obstacles to interstellar travel are perfecting the nonchemical propulsion technologies we already know about and combatting boredom enroute.”
“You’re saying that you, personally, plan to visit exoplanets?”
“Correct. Extrapolating current progress both in propulsion science and life-extension biology, I estimate that I will be one hundred fifty-one years old when usable antimatter or plasma drive vessels become available.”
“You’re serious.”
Quentin Callisto nodded. “If a ship can accelerate to one third of light speed, and its crew can live for hundreds of years, then thousands of Earthlikes are reachable. The only problem will be boredom.”
Kate raised her eyebrows. No wonder Andrea wanted Quentin to answer Kate’s questions directly.
Quentin said, “You think I’m crazy.”
“I think you’re a visionary.”
“So did Manny.”
“You talked to Manny about your plans?”
“Sure. And he agreed with me.”
“That people would do all that you plan?”
Quentin shook his head. “Not exactly. He just agreed that it would be a long, boring trip.”
Kate asked, “At these meetings did you cross fertilize with any of Manny’s partners or ex-partners who were more directly connected with life-extension research? Especially any who might be willing to talk to me about it?”
Callisto tugged his goatee. “Maybe. Most of the division presidents were as nice as Manny. The only real prick was Victor Carlsson. People said Manny only put up with Carlsson because C-phone was such a cash cow and the phone business was such a shark tank. But C-phone’s got nothing to do with the life-extension stuff. Nolan Liu was in charge of Cardinal’s whole life-extension research operation right up until he left. He’s kind of old, and kind of private, but I always got along with him. Tell him I sent you and maybe he’ll talk to you.”
* * *
Kate drove back southwest toward San Francisco as the afternoon sun slanted in through the windshield.
It had been a long drive just to get an entrée to this Nolan Liu. But Kate had gained an insight into why Manuel Colibri may have been cornering the life-extension market. Maybe he didn’t want to ski behind more yachts. Maybe he wanted to survive until the Methuselarity, so he could play science officer on the Enterprise, like Quentin Callisto wanted to.
If Colibri had his head beyond the clouds, instead of on business, maybe his shareholders, if he had any, had decided to have him blown up. Or an ambitious subordinate, like this also-private Mr. Liu, had.
Or Carlsson the cutthroat phone prick had.
At the moment, her father would say there were still too many unknowns to formulate a working hypothesis.
As she drove, she tugged her phone from her purse, started Googling, and began solving the story problem one phrase at a time. Quickly she discovered that Manny Colibri and Nolan Liu may have been shy, but plenty of Cardinal’s other executives, especially Carlsson, loved the spotlight.
An hour later, she paused, dialed the house and, as usual, got no answer, then sighed.
The best way to communicate, whether with aliens, with geeks, or with Jack Boyle, was face-to-face.
She had coaxed a little truth out of Quentin just by getting face-to-face. With Jack Boyle the truth was blacker, and it was buried deeper. But getting face-to-face over a couple of beers was a way to begin, at least. Kate leaned forward as she regripped the wheel, then put her foot down harder.
SIXTEEN
Powell Hall rose near Nob Hill’s summit like a stone behemoth scarcely contained by a spiked iron fence twelve feet tall. Today the latest in the line of Powells who had owned Powell Hall was away at another of the family homesteads, on the shore of Lake Tahoe.
Jack Boyle cranked the Ford’s window down, reached out and poked the call button on the wall of the mansion’s empty guard box.
The speaker above the call button crackled. “Mr. Boyle? I’m sorry nobody’s on the gate. Since Mr. Powell’s out of town I gave most of the staff a thirty-six hour pass. I thought when you phoned you said quarter past.”
“I did, Paul. I’m early.”
The gate box speaker buzzed, and as motors swung the gates open the head of David Powell’s household staff said, “I’ll meet you at the front door, sir.”
Jack slid the Ford into the visitor’s space in the tiny, cobbled courtyard, which was wide and long enough to fit a couple of catering trucks or stretch limos. On Snob Hill’s tiny crest, square footage devoted to occasional parking was the very definition of regal exclusivity.
Jack squinted up at the neoclassical stone palace as he crossed the courtyard to the front doors. Powell Hall looked exactly as it had on his last visit, three years before. In fact, it looked exactly as it had in the predawn of April 18, 1906, before it, like all save one of the mansions on Nob Hill, and much of the rest of the city, had then been destroyed by the earthquake and fires that recast San Francisco forever.
Today luxury hotels rose from the ashes of the Nob Hill mansions that the likes of Leland Stanford had abandoned. The sole surviving original mansion had long ago been sold, and now housed the exclusive Pacific Union Club.
Only David Powell’s grandfather had rebuilt the house on the hill that his own father before him had constructed. He had rebuilt with replacement Connecticut brownstone imported, again, 15,000 miles around Cape Horn from the New England quarry from which the original stone had been cut.
And only the spiked high fence altered the house’s original external appearance. David had been forced to add it during the recession, in 2011, after one of a mob trying to “occupy” Powell Hall, “symbol of the One Percent’s greed,” set himself and the shrubbery on fire while scaling a drain pipe when he fumbled his Molotov cocktail. The irony of it was that updated equipment, funded by the Powell Foundation at the St. Francis Hospital Burn Unit, saved the guy’s life.
Jack climbed the last step to the front doors and heard their locks click open like a rifle salute.
Paul Eustis, militarily precise in a morning coat, striped trousers and spats looked as much a throwback as did the mansion that he ran for David Powell. “Mr. Boyle, you are lookin’ well.”
The Georgian, a head shorter than Jack, turned and led the way across the two-story foyer’s familiar marble toward the inconspicuous door, around the side of the grand staircase at the foyer’s end, that led down to the great house’s utility level. The two men’s footsteps echoed in the chandeliered silence. The Georgian’s steps quieter, even though he walked with one leg stiff.
“You look good too, Paul. Leg’s better?”
“Well, they say the winter’s gonna be wet, and that won’t help. But the wettest winter in San Francisco’s dryer than the driest summer in the Mekong, sir.”
From the paneled wall to Jack’s left, gilt framed oil portraits of David Powell’s great-grandfather, grandfather and father stared down at Jack. Each painting was larger than the door of a more common family’s refrigerator, and the stern eyes that peered down from each face could easily have been David Powell’s, save for differences of fashion in facial hair and clothing. If any family bloodline in San Francisco qualified as royal, it was the Powells of Nob Hill.
Paul paused to rest his leg and leaned against the foyer’s only freestanding decoration, a chest-high wood and glass case, set on the floor beneath the central chandelier.
The case contained a simple carved chess set and board, with the pieces forever arranged so that badly outnumbered white had checkmated black.
David had told Jack that David’s grandfather had bought the set because it was the very one on which Anderssen and Kieseritzky had played an exhibition, that came to be called the “Immortal Game,” in London in 1851. Jack had asked why, if the game was immortal, the board’s varnish had faded.
As the retired staff sergeant recovered, he asked, “How can I help you today, sir?”
“You said David mentioned I might call?”
Paul inclined a head of close-cropped gray hair. “Yes, sir. Mr. Powell instructed me to render you any assistance you deemed necessary.”
“Anybody home back in the foundation office today?”
Eustis pressed his lips together as he shook his head. “I’m afraid that Mr. Powell’s absence has prompted Ms. Haggen to give herself the day off as well.”
Jack rubbed his cheek to hide his smile. Gloria Haggen administered the Powell family charities from a tiny office in a remodeled toolshed behind Powell Hall, that was accessed from the lower kitchen and laundry level.
In thirty years association with the Hagg, Jack Boyle had learned three lessons about her. The first was that she would never share anything about the family’s Byzantine philanthropies with some snot atheist night school lawyer who worked on the opposite side of the incorporeal firewall that separated the Powell charities from Powell Diversified. The second was that the Hagg never missed a chance to dodge an honest day’s work. The third lesson was that she never missed a chance to openly criticize the hick crippled veteran who had replaced her as head of household, when she was kicked downstairs to look after the Powell charities.
