“How come?”
“Simple trigonometry. If a pilot is lined up with a mountain peak a hundred miles away and he initiates even a two-degree turn that peak should slide off his course by…by…Come on, Carl, you’re the mathematician.”
“Ah…three or four miles.”
“That sort of thing gives the pilot a very sensitive indicator to turning performance, or lack of it. And, of course, in the flare-out phase of landing, with the aircraft only feet away from the ground and still travelling at two hundred miles an hour…”
Leygraf thought for a moment. “You know, you could have something pretty fantastic on your hands if you could develop this material even further. Do you think you could step up the delay to the point where it was obvious?”
“That,” Garrod replied, “is what I’m going to find out.”
“Is this what you’ve been working on all these weeks?” Esther Garrod stared dubiously at the crystal rectangle which covered her husband’s right hand. “It looks like an ordinary piece of glass.”
“But it isn’t.” Garrod took a childish delight in prolonging the moment. “This is…slow glass.” He tried to identify the expression on her neat, diamond-cut features, refusing to accept that it might be hostility.
“Slow glass. I wish I could understand what has happened to you, Alban. On the phone you said you were bringing me a piece of glass which was two million miles thick.”
“But this glass is two million miles thick—as far as a ray of light is concerned.” Garrod became aware he was using the wrong approach, but could not decide how to change his course. “Or, to put it another way, this piece of glass is almost eleven light-seconds thick.”
Esther’s lips moved silently and she turned away towards the window beyond which a single beech tree shone like a fire in the late sunlight.
“Look, Esther.” Garrod spoke urgently. He held the crystal rectangle steady with his left hand and quickly took his right hand away from underneath it. Esther looked at his hand and screamed as she saw yet another right hand still framed in the glass.
“I’m sorry,” Garrod said helplessly. “That was a stupid thing to do. I’d forgotten what it’s like the first time.”
Esther stared at the glass until the hand in it, moving with a life of its own, flicked to one side and ceased to exist. “What did you do?”
“Nothing, darling. I simply held my hand behind the glass until its image, the light being reflected from it, had passed through. This is a special kind of glass that light takes eleven seconds to pass through, so the image was still visible in it eleven seconds after my hand had been removed. There’s nothing spooky about it.”
Esther shook her head. “I don’t like it.”
Garrod felt the beginnings of a kind of desperation. “Esther, you’re going to be the first woman in the history of the entire human race to see her own face as it really is. Look into the glass please.” He held the rectangular crystal before her.
“This is silly. I’ve looked in mirrors…”
“It isn’t silly—go along with it and see. The reason I said no woman had ever really seen her own face is that a mirror reverses left and right. If you had a mole on your left cheek, the woman you saw in the mirror would have a mole on her right cheek. But with slow glass…”
Garrod turned the glass, and Esther was looking into her own face. Her image persisted for eleven seconds, mouthing silently, until the light had made its way through the crystalline structure of the material—then it vanished. He waited for her to speak.
She smiled wanly. “Am I suposed to be impressed?”
“Frankly, yes.”
“I’m sorry, Alban.” She walked back to the window and stood gazing out at the descending vistas of lawns. Looking at the silhouette, Garrod noticed how her arms hung clear of her body, elbows slightly bent. He remembered from anthropology classes that this was normal differentiation from a male, whose arms would be expected to hang straight, but to his imagination it made Esther’s compact form seem assertive, tensed to exert her control. A cold white start of anger began to burn inside him.
“You’re sorry,” he snapped. “Well, I’m sorry too—sorry you haven’t the vision to realize what this material is going to mean to us and the rest of the world when it’s fully developed.”
She turned to face him. “I didn’t want to mention this tonight, when we’re both tired, but as you have raised the point…”
“Go on.”
“I was talking to Mawson in accounts last week and he told me you were scheduling research and development costs of over a million for your…slow glass.” She gave him a sad smile. “You realize, of course, that it’s too preposterous for words.”
“I don’t see why.”
“I don’t see why,” she repeated scornfully. “Don’t you see that no parlour trick is worth that kind of money?”
“I really am sorry for you, Esther.”
“Don’t be.” Her voice grew rich and warm as she played the trump card which during their two years of marriage had often been selected but never laid on the table. “I’m afraid I just couldn’t allow you to be so careless with Dad’s money.”
Garrod took a deep breath. He had dreaded this moment for days, yet now that it was here he felt a curious elation in acting out the little tableau. “Have you been talking to Maw-son within the last two days?”
“No.”
“I’ll reprimand him on your behalf—he doesn’t make the grade as a commercial spy.”
Esther glanced up at him, suddenly wary. “What are you talking about?”
“Mawson should have informed you that I leased out a couple of subsidiary patents on Thermgard this week. It was done in secret, of course, but he should have been on to it.”
“Is that all? Listen, Alban, the fact that you have finally managed to earn a few dollars off your own bat doesn’t…”
“Five million,” Garrod said pleasantly.
“What?” The colour had left Esther’s face.
“Five million. I paid your father off this afternoon.” Garrod watched his wife’s jaw drop, and one part of his mind noted that the look of open-mouthed, white-toothed astonishment made her look more beautiful than at any other time he could remember. “He looked almost as shocked as you do now.”
“I’m not surprised at that.” Esther, always good at infighting, altered her tack on the instant. “I don’t understand how you managed to get five million out of a windshield material which is useless for windshields, but you did it by using Dad’s money as a springboard—don’t forget he let you have an unsecured loan at minimum interest. A gentleman would have offered him the chance…”
“To buy in solid? Sorry, Esther—Thermgard belongs to me. Alone.”
“You’ll get nowhere with it,” she predicted. “You’ll lose every cent.”
“Think so?” Garrod walked to the window, held the rectangular crystal up to it, then strode quickly to the darkest corner of the room. When he turned to face her, Esther took a step backwards and shielded her eyes. In his hands, blinding in its red-gold magnificence, Garrod held the setting sun.
Sidelight One
Light of Other Days
Leaving the village behind, we followed the heady sweeps of the road up into a land of slow glass.
I had never seen one of the farms before and at first found them slightly eerie—an effect heightened by imagination and circumstance. The car’s turbine was pulling smoothly and quietly in the damp air so that we seemed to be carried over the convolutions of the road in a kind of supernatural silence. On our right the mountain sifted down into a perfect valley of timeless pine, and everywhere stood the great frames of slow glass, drinking light. An occasional flash of afternoon sunlight on their wind bracing created an illusion of movement, but in fact the frames were deserted. The rows of windows had been standing on the hillside for years, staring into the valley, and men only cleaned them in the middle of the night when their human presence would not matter to the thirsty glass.