It was a mercy the bar was so large. The two men were singing loudly in unison a comic song in Spanish and there was much laughter each time the chorus came round. For all his time in this corner of the United States, Beard did not understand a word. He raised his hand for another drink and it was with him almost immediately and he was digging it out from under the rubble of ice. Was ever a marriage dissolved so painlessly? Within a week she had left for the hill farm in Powys. In the course of a year they exchanged a couple of postcards. Then one came from an ashram in India, where she remained for three years and from where she sent one day her cheery acceptance of a divorce, all papers duly signed. He did not see her until his twenty-sixth birthday, at which she appeared with a shaved head and a jewel in her nose. Many years later he spoke at her funeral. Perhaps it was the ease of their parting in the old rectory that made him so incautious about marrying again, and again.
With some difficulty, he got to his feet and made his way across the rotunda bar towards the lavatory. By local standards, which were high, he was not an exceptionally fat man. Even now he could see a couple who easily outranked him, a man and a woman obliged by their shape to perch on the edge of their armchairs. But Beard was a fat man just the same, and his knees hurt and he felt dizzy from having stood too quickly. As he crossed the lobby, one of the clerks came out from behind the reception desk and hurried after him.
‘Excuse me, Mr Beard, sir? I thought it was you. Welcome to the Camino Real? There was a gentleman looking for you?’
‘Mr Hammer?’
‘No. It was about a week ago? From England? But he didn’t leave a message?’
‘What did he look like?’
‘I guess, kind of large? And said his name was something like Turnip?’
They would have continued with their questions, but at that moment Beard saw Hammer coming through the glass entrance doors, preceded by the porter with a luggage trolley. As the two men embraced, the clerk moved away with a self-effacing grimace and Beard nodded thanks in his direction.
‘Toby!’
‘Chief!’
Ever since Hammer learned that this was what Beard was once called, he had taken it up, in an ironic way. Others on the project had adopted it too and Beard, of course, was pleased. It almost made up for having been sacked from the Centre.
He was three years older than Beard, and was lean and strong and had the straight back, the clarity of eyes and skin of a man who had not touched a drink in twenty years. Although he walked bandy-legged, like a saddle-weary cowboy, he still played squash and backpacked alone in the High Sierras. Or he said he did. After time in his company, Beard often put himself on a diet that lasted many hours. Hammer’s background was in electronics, but in the early eighties he decided to become a drunk and wreck his marriage and drive all his friends away in the customary manner. Once he was through his recovery and had got everyone back, including his wife and children, he began to develop work that had no clear job description. He knew people and introduced them, and fixed up deals. He introduced Beard to the tax-break lawyers and accountants who knew the state legislature, the go-betweens in Washington who patrolled the vast and vague territory between commerce and politics, and people who had a line to the grant-givers of the big foundations, the venture-capital types who knew people who knew friends of men like Vinod Khosla and Shai Agassi. Hammer steered Beard’s patent applications through, secured the lease on the land near Lordsburg with a right to buy, learned to find his way around the solar fraternity and knew the engineers and the materials specialists. He had even squeezed money out of the Bush people in their dying days and, recently, far more from the bounty of Obama.
But Hammer could not protect the project from delay, and progressive shrinkage and, at times, near-complete collapse. There was compromise at every stage. The site in Lordsburg was a fourth choice in the American South-West. There were more sunshine hours per year in parts of Arizona and Nevada, but competition from the big utilities had pushed up prices. Other locations had no water, or no good road or nearby connection to the grid, nor such a friendly local Chamber of Commerce. The company he and Beard and others formed had been forced to reconstitute three times over to qualify for tax breaks. Homeland Security were suspicious of Beard’s alien status, and letters from prominent American science academies made little difference in the Bush years. Money was hard, even in the good times. Among the venture capitalists who cared about solar, the consensus was that the two best bets were on the tried and tested routes, solar thermal – focusing the sun’s heat to make steam to drive turbines – or photovoltaics – generating current directly from sunlight – and in both cases, concentrating the light with magnifying lenses. Reliable and cheap artificial photosynthesis was twenty years away, was the general view.
To disprove it, in early 2007 Beard mounted a demonstration to potential backers in a parking lot outside a lab in Oakland, California. The idea was that in full sunshine a large bottle of water would be split into its constituent gases, which would cause a fuel-cell generator to power an electric jack-hammer with which a man in a green hardhat would destroy a wall which bore the graffito ‘oil’. But certain vital parts failed to be delivered, the meeting was postponed for a month, and then only half of the investors showed up and the project got one third of the money and shrank a good deal more.
The technical difficulties grew as the money declined. Tom Aldous had been correct in his general assumptions, and wrong in certain particulars, though Beard could hardly complain now that he owned seventeen patents. For a long time the little lab model that split water in 2005 could not be scaled up or made to work faster. The light-sensitive dyes that drove the process had to be reconsidered. The catalyst was not derived from manganese, but from a compound of cobalt, and another from ruthenium. Choosing and testing the right porous membrane to divide hydrogen from oxygen should have been easy but was not. The time came at last to design and build the prototype that one day would be mass-produced. An outfit near Paris was chosen. The panel, the glorious achievement, was two metres square and cost three million dollars. It was sent away for testing at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, and was found to be underperforming by three hundred per cent, and flawed in both design and construction.
They started again with a Chinese company sixty miles from Beijing. The tubes containing the light-harvesting semiconductor, the aqueous electrolytes and the membrane were of plexiglas on top, with a base of conducting stainless steel. The panel that housed the tubes was three metres by two, and each unit cost four million dollars. Once in mass-production, they would cost ten thousand dollars, so the business plan said. According to the lab at Golden, the new panel worked. By then, the world was in recession. Many promises made to Hammer were broken. The option on the land, renewed three times already, was expiring. Toby renegotiated and instead of the four hundred acres, bought twenty-five, right by the water source. There were now two small gas-storage tanks instead of eight giants, only one compressor for the hydrogen, one generator instead of five, and, worst of all, because they were the core and symbol of the project, a mere twenty-three panels tilted skywards instead of one hundred and twenty-five.
But they were finally in place, and the day after tomorrow a new chapter would begin in the history of industrial civilisation, and the earth’s future would be assured. The sun would shine on an empty patch of land in the boot heel of south-west New Mexico, strike the plexiglas tubes and split water, the storage tanks would fill with gas, the fuel-cell generator would turn and electricity would be ready to flow to the town in front of friends from Lordsburg, representatives of the national media, people from the power companies, colleagues from Golden and MIT, Caltech and the Lawrence Berkeley labs, as well as a few entrepreneurs from the Stanford area. A press pack, including a special glossy brochure, would be available. All this had been arranged by Hammer and his team. Under a vast marquee that he swore he had got for free from NASA, they would drink champagne,
give interviews and talk about contracts. At a given signal, the Nobel laureate would throw a switch and the new era would commence.
Now, in the bright expanse of the hotel’s lobby, Hammer gave an account of his trying journey from San Francisco, of a terrifying air pocket that dropped the plane two thousand feet, his neighbour’s panic attack, of an inedible sandwich, until Beard’s bladder could stand no more and he excused himself. When he came back he found his friend sitting in reception, rattling emails on his laptop.
‘Scientific American are coming,’ he said, without breaking stride. ‘And that thin guy from the New York Times.’
‘This had better work,’ Beard said. The electric jackhammer had thrown a long shadow.
‘Some local business has put together a giant neon sign that says Lordsburg, exclamation mark. They want to situate it a quarter-mile from us, and have it light up when we turn on.’
‘As long as they supply the quarter-mile of cable.’
Hammer put his laptop away. He looked weary, even a little depressed. ‘They want it on all night. And the Chamber of Commerce has lined up an army marching band from outside Las Cruces.’
‘I thought we were having a girl country group.’
‘In New Mexico, or this part of it, you have to have the army first. We also have a fly-past from the air-force base. The girls will play later, and of course, we’ll be powering their amps.’ In what looked like an effort to appear cheerful, he punched Beard’s arm. ‘Sunlight, water and money make electricity makes more money! My friend. It’s going to happen.’
They agreed to have an early dinner and to stay the night and leave straight after Beard had seen his doctor.
‘But listen, Chief,’ Hammer said as they took their places in the deserted dining room. ‘Don’t let him make you ill. This is not the time.’
‘That’s my worry too. A diagnosis is a kind of modern curse. If you didn’t go and see these people, you wouldn’t get whatever it is they want you to have.’
With wine and water they raised a toast to magical thinking, then they continued a conversation they had been having by email for some months. To an eavesdropper it would have sounded like the essence of commercial tedium, but to the two men it was a matter of urgency. How many orders for panels were necessary to bring the unit cost down to the point at which they could feasibly claim that a mediumsized artificial-photosynthesis plant could generate electricity as cheaply as coal? The energy market was highly conservative. There was no premium for being virtuous, for not screwing up the climate system. Orders for seven thousand panels, this was their best calculation. Much would depend on whether they could reliably power Lordsburg and its environs night and day for a year, through all kinds of weather. And it also depended on the Chinese, how fast they could move, and how plausibly they could be threatened by the prospect of losing the business. In that respect, the recession helped, but it would also depress demand for panels, if not for energy. They went round this topic a few times, quoting figures, plucking others from the air, then Hammer leaned forward and said confidentially, as though the sole waiter on the far side of the restaurant might hear him, ‘But, Chief, you can be straight with me. Tell me. Is it true, the planet’s getting cooler?’
‘What?’
‘You keep telling me the arguments are over, but they’re not. I’m hearing it everywhere. Last week some woman professor of atmosphere studies or something was saying so on public television.’
‘Whoever she says she is, she’s wrong.’
‘And I’m hearing it everywhere from business people. It seems like it’s building. They’re saying the scientists have gotten it wrong but don’t dare to admit it. Too many careers and reputations on the line.’
‘What’s their evidence?’
‘They’re saying a point-seven-degree rise since pre-industrial times, that’s two hundred and fifty years, is negligible, well within usual fluctuations. And the last ten years have been below the average. We’ve had some bad winters here – that doesn’t help our cause. And they’re also saying that too many people are going to get rich on the Obama handouts and tax breaks to want to tell the truth. Then there are all these scientists, including the one I was talking about, who’ve signed up to the Senate Minority Report on Climate Change – you must have seen that stuff.’
Beard hesitated, then called for more wine. That was the trouble with some of these Californian reds, they were so smoothly accessible, they went down like lemonade. But they were sixteen per cent alcohol. He could not help feeling that this conversation was beneath him. It wearied him, like talking about or against religion, or crop circles and UFOs for that matter. He said, ‘It’s zero point eight now, it’s not negligible in climate terms, and most of it has happened in the last thirty years. And ten years is not enough to establish a trend. You need at least twenty-five. Some years are hotter, some are cooler than the year before, and if you drew a graph of average yearly temperatures it would be a zigzag, but a rising zigzag. When you take an exceptionally hot year as your starting point, you can easily show a decline, at least for a few years. That’s an old trick, called framing, or cherry-picking. As for these scientists who signed some contrarian document, they’re in a minority of a thousand to one, Toby. Ornithologists, epidemiologists, oceanographers and glaciologists, salmon fishermen and ski-lift operators, the consensus is overwhelming. Some weak-brained journalists write against it because they think it’s a sign of independent thinking. And there’s plenty of attention out there for a professor who’ll speak against it. There are bad scientists, just like there are rotten singers and terrible cooks.’
Hammer looked sceptical. ‘If the place isn’t hotting up, we’re fucked.’
As he refilled his glass, Beard thought how strange it was, that after being associates for all these years, they had rarely discussed the larger issue. They had always concentrated on the business, the matter in hand. Beard also noticed that he himself was close to being drunk.
‘Here’s the good news. The UN estimates that already a third of a million people a year are dying from climate change. Bangladesh is going down because the oceans are warming and expanding and rising. There’s drought in the Amazonian rainforest. Methane is pouring out of the Siberian permafrost. There’s a meltdown under the Greenland ice sheet that no one really wants to talk about. Amateur yachtsmen have been sailing the North-West Passage. Two years ago we lost forty per cent of the Arctic summer ice. Now the eastern Antarctic is going. The future has arrived, Toby.’
‘Yeah,’ Hammer said. ‘I guess.’
‘You’re not convinced. Here’s the worst case. Suppose the near impossible – the thousand are wrong and the one is right, the data are all skewed, there’s no warming. It’s a mass delusion among scientists, or a plot. Then we still have the old stand-bys. Energy security, air pollution, peak oil.’
‘No one’s going to buy a fancy panel from us just because the oil’s going to run out in thirty years.’
‘What’s wrong with you? Trouble at home?’
‘Nothing like that. Just that I put in all this work, then guys in white coats come on TV to say the planet’s not heating. I get spooked.’
Beard laid a hand on his friend’s arm, a sure sign that he was well over his limit. ‘Toby, listen. It’s a catastrophe. Relax!’
By nine thirty, the two men, exhausted by travel, were ready for their beds and went up in the elevator together. Beard’s floor was first. He said goodnight to Hammer, then set off with his luggage down many long corridors at right angles, murmuring to himself his room number to keep it fresh in his mind, and stopping occasionally to bend, swaying, in front of wall plaques with designations like ‘309–331’, while his own, 399, was not mentioned or implied anywhere. So he kept going, eventually arriving from a different direction back by the elevator, or one like it, with a similar brown apple core reclining in a sand-filled ashtray. With a welling sense of victimhood he set off again, eventually passing the elevator once more. He
was well into his third circuit before he understood that he was holding the room card upside down and his destination was 663, on another floor. He rode up, found his room, dumped his luggage just inside the door and made for the minibar, from which he took a brandy and an outsized bar of chocolate and sat with them on the edge of his bed.
It was, fortunately, far too late to phone Melissa, and too early to phone Darlene, who would be at work. All he had the strength for was the remote. Before it came on, the TV set gave out a homely, muffled crackling sound of warming electronics, as kindly and familiar as a mother’s kiss. But not his mother’s. He was tired and drunk and all he could do was surf. Here were the usual, unsurprising things – game and chat shows, tennis, cartoons, a congressional committee, moronic ads. Two women to whom he would at that moment have entrusted his life spoke to each other about their husbands’ Alzheimer’s. A young couple exchanged a meaningful look that provoked a gust of cackling from a studio audience. Someone said, as though in protest, that President Obama was still a saint, still loved. These days Beard described himself as a ‘lifelong Democrat’. He often spoke at climate-change events of the fateful moment in 2000, when the earth’s fate hung in the balance, and Bush snatched victory from Gore to preside over the tragedy of eight wasted years. But Beard had long ago lost interest in the plenitude and strangeness of America as represented by its television. They had hundreds of channels in Romania now, and everywhere else on the planet. Besides which, if it was on TV, it was no longer strange. But he was too tired to lift his thumb from the channel-up button, and for forty minutes he sat in a stupor with an empty glass and empty wrapper on his lap, then he made himself comfortable on the cushions behind him and fell asleep.