“I don’t follow. If this is a computer-generated environment, then it must have limitations.”
“You’re thinking way too parochially, Auger. This environment doesn’t have to have any limits at all.”
“What about physics?” Auger picked up one of the cardboard coasters that were strewn on the table and held it between thumb and forefinger. “This feels real to me, but if I looked at it in a scanning tunnelling microscope or ran it through a mass spectrometer—what would I find?”
“Exactly what you’d expect, I guess. It would look just the way it should.”
“Because this environment is simulated right down to atomic granularity?”
“No,” Skellsgard said, “not necessarily. But if the machine running the environment is sufficiently clever, it can make your microscope or your spectrometer show you whatever it thinks you expect. Remember: any tools you might bring to bear on the problem are themselves part of the problem.”
Auger sat back in her seat. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“It’s pretty much academic anyway. There aren’t any scanning tunnelling microscopes just lying around here waiting to be picked up.”
“Then you’ve not performed such tests?”
“We’ve done what we can, given the very limited tools we’ve been able to put our hands on. And none of those tests have revealed anything other than the physics we’d expect.”
“But just because you can’t get your hands on those tools doesn’t mean they don’t exist somewhere.”
“Break into physics laboratories, you mean?”
“No, nothing that drastic. Just monitor their publications. This is the twentieth century, Skellsgard. It’s the century of Einstein and Heisenberg. Those men can’t be sleeping on the job, surely.”
“Well, there’s a problem with that. Fundamental science is nowhere near as advanced here as it was in our nineteen fifty-nine. Remember I told you there was no Second World War here, and therefore no computer revolution?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it had even greater effects than that. There was no Manhattan project, either. No one has the A-bomb here. Without the A-bomb, there’s been no need to develop a ballistic-missile programme. Without a ballistic-missile programme, there’s no space race. There are no huge government-funded science agencies.”
“But surely there’s still some scientific research and development going on.”
“In dribs and drabs. But it’s unfocused, underfunded, socially unpopular.”
Auger managed a half-smile. “No change there, then.”
“What I mean is, it’s almost as if…” But something made Skellsgard stop and shrug.
“Almost as if what?” Auger prompted.
“Well, I was going to say… it’s almost as if someone’s holding it back deliberately.”
“Who would stand to benefit from that?”
“Well,” Skellsgard said, “at a guess, anyone who didn’t want the people here to know what their world was really like.”
THIRTEEN
Floyd crunched the Mathis’s tyres against the pavement outside Blanchard’s building on rue des Peupliers. Floyd and Custine had made an early start after breakfast, and although Floyd’s head was ringing like a cracked bell—too much wine, too much music—with it came a kind of fragile alertness. His throat was raw from talking over the noise in Le Perroquet Pourpre compounded by all the coffee he had pushed down it since waking.
“Go easy on Blanchard,” Floyd said as he let Custine out of the car, toolkit in hand. “I don’t want you even to hint that we suspect he may have done it.”
“I suspect nothing,” Custine said. “I merely wish to close off that particular possibility.”
“Make sure you don’t close off the case while you’re at it.”
“Trust me, Floyd: when it comes to these matters, I have at least as much experience as you.”
“Have you remembered anything else about that typewriter in the Quai?”
“I can still see that cell. Beyond that, nothing. But I’m sure it will come to me.”
Floyd drove back to the office. The elevator was working, for now at least. He rode the grinding, groaning box to the third floor and let himself into his rooms. He poured a cup of tepid coffee, then picked up the telephone and made another attempt to call the number in Berlin. Same result: the line was still dead. The operator couldn’t tell him whether the number was incorrect, or if the telephone at the other end had simply been disconnected. He fingered the letter from Kaspar Metals, unwilling to throw away what seemed like the strongest lead in the case.
While the telephone was still hot, he thumbed through his directory until he found the number of an old contact in porte d’Asnières. Formerly a skilled metalworker, he had been laid off from the Citroën factory after an industrial accident and now worked from home. Although not a musician himself, he made a modest living by repairing brass instruments.
The man picked up on the seventh ring. “Basso.”
“It’s Floyd. How are you doing?”
“Wendell. What a pleasant surprise. Do you have something for me to look at? A trombone someone sat on?”
“Not today,” Floyd said. “Custine and I haven’t been getting out enough to mistreat our instruments. I was hoping that you could answer a couple of questions for me.”
“About repairing instruments?”
“About metalworking. Something’s come up in the case we’re working at the moment and I don’t know what to make of it.”
He heard Basso settle into his chair. “Tell me.”
“I’ve got something that looks like a sketch made from a blueprint, and a letter related to a contract with a Berlin metalworks. What I can’t figure out is what the contract is for.”
“Do you have anything to go on?”
“It looks like the main work was the casting of three big spheres of solid aluminium.”
“Big spheres,” Basso said ruminatively. “How big, exactly?”
“Three, maybe three and a half metres across, if I’m reading the sketch properly.”
“Big indeed,” he concurred.
“You have any idea what they might be?”
“I’d need to look at the sketch, Wendell. Then I might be able to tell you something. Did you say solid aluminium?”
“I think so.”
“I wondered for a moment whether they might be bells. Can you bring the sketch over, Wendell? I might be more use to you in person.”
“This morning?”
“No time like the present.”
Floyd agreed and put down the telephone. Five minutes later, he was on his way to the seventeenth, with Custine’s saxophone in the passenger seat next to him.
By the time Auger and Skellsgard left the café on Saint-Germain, the sky had brightened. There was more traffic about, more windows open, more pedestrians on the streets. The city was coming awake.
“Look at it this way,” Skellsgard said. “We have no evidence to suspect that this is a simulation, at least while science here is still stuck in the nineteen thirties. But there’s another angle.”
“And what’s that?”
“We assume everything we see is real, made out of something more or less like normal matter. Maybe someone—some entity—created this place as a kind of snapshot, a backup copy of the real Earth. By intention or otherwise, the backup copy is running forward in time, progressing away from the instant when it was created. Therefore this is an actual planet, populated by real people. Physics works flawlessly. The only thing that isn’t real is the sky.”
“Because we’re inside an ALS sphere?”