Equilateral (3 page)

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When she stops in to see Thayer, he has clearly declined. His head is sunk into his pillow, while his eyes have receded into their sockets. He appears exhausted.

He murmurs, “Ballard says …”

Dismayed, she turns sharply to glare at the girl, who has been standing at the foot of the bed, holding a pitcher. Bint lowers her eyes.

“Mr. Ballard says many things,” Miss Keaton snaps. “Not all of them to his credit. Dr. McKinnon has prescribed sleep and rest. Let’s keep that foremost.” She rearranges Thayer’s pillows and says, more softly, “A convoy of fresh men arrived at Point B yesterday. They’re already in the field.”

She turns to the girl and with her hands together leans the side of her head against them. She repeats, “Sleep and rest. Sleep and rest.”

The girl nods uncertainly. Miss Keaton wonders if she thinks she’s telling her to pray.

She takes another look at Thayer before leaving and then
walks the few paces to her office within the warren of attached tents and mud-brick structures that comprises the Equilateral’s chief administrative compound.

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Miss Keaton is fully trusted as the single individual capable of keeping the entire scope of the undertaking, theoretical and practical, within her field of view. She inspects the daily reports, issuing questions and demands for clarification in Thayer’s name, and she corresponds directly with London from Point A’s telegraphic station, whose cable extends 510 miles to the bureau of the Eastern Telegraph Company in Alexandria. She’s well aware of the excavation’s difficulties. She believes they can be resolved through more dedicated, more intelligent application of effort. June the seventeenth can still be met, if Ballard will only properly manage his men.

Even while performing her administrative duties, the secretary continues to take Thayer’s dictation and frequently composes arguments in his name, reiterating the evidence for the Martian canals and for the Equilateral’s inevitability—and not only for its inevitability but also for its necessity, and not only for its necessity but also for its perfect crystalline beauty. She responds to newspaper inquiries, the more foolish with the most patience. She can knock down his opponents with as much force as if Thayer himself threw the punch.

The range of nonterrestrial phenomena are delimited by her computations no less than the quantities of soil removed and foodstuffs consumed. She can foretell precisely the elliptical, elegant, careening loop-the-loops performed by the planets in
their traces. She turns declinations into azimuths; looking up from the page, she counts off the hours of right ascension. She has seen the canals and, viewing from the twenty-four-inch Cassegrain reflector at Thayer’s private observatory in Kent, she discovered the 1890 completion of the waterway between Elysium and Trivium Charontis. Thayer calls the verdant, newly irrigated region Keatonia. He has labeled it that on every map issued from his drawing table.

The secretary comprehends what the canals imply, in all their promise and dread. While Thayer originated the idea of the Equilateral on his own over many years of brooding consideration, Miss Keaton had been his first audience, listening to his proposal in rapt silence. She responded with shrewd, succinct refinements.

Miss Keaton’s office is dominated by a large pedestal desk and four oak filing cabinets. The Concession’s sectional maps of the Western Desert are fastened to the walls of the tent. They’ve been marked heavily. Although the missing tankers have receded from present concern, Miss Keaton has returned quivering. With no one to observe her, she lays her head on the desk. She’s soaked under her arms and in the small of the back. Her stays chafe. She wishes she could fully immerse herself in a bath.

Thayer’s illness has been a blow to them all. He looked awful this afternoon. The engineer should never have been allowed into his sickroom. Miss Keaton has of course kept Thayer informed of the delays, while exercising a certain degree of tact. Ballard is incapable of this tact, either with Thayer or with anyone else.

Miss Keaton blames Bint for the intrusion. She knows she’s
being unfair, for the slight, quiet girl can’t possibly assume the authority to turn away the chief engineer. She can hardly speak a word of English. But the secretary believes that, once entrusted with Thayer’s care, Bint should, must, exercise powers beyond those of her birth or station. Either that or Miss Keaton will have to remain with Thayer while he’s ill and water tankers will continue to go astray, segments of piping will remain unconnected, accounts will be overdrawn, men will be sent into the desert without spades, and the Equilateral will never be done.

Δ

A man requires two quarts of drinking water per day. A man performing arduous physical labor in subtropical desert heat requires five quarts, though the Egyptians, acclimated to the arid conditions of their homeland, can survive on three and a half quarts. Nine hundred thousand fellahin performing these labors thus require 787,500 gallons of water every day, which must be delivered to them at their work sites, brought directly to their ever-parched lips. Some of the drinking water has been obtained by draining the few springs that lie beneath the Western Desert, but most has to be transported from the Nile, the land’s munificent all-provider, along an aqueduct constructed by the Concession and guarded against diversion by its troops. The conduit terminates at Point B, where the water is funneled into mule-drawn tankers, which are then dispatched to the work sites along the Equilateral’s perimeter.

The water vanishes within the nine hundred thousand men. Tomorrow another 787,500 gallons will have to be delivered.

In the desert a laborer requires refreshment every two hours. Without it he weakens. Without it his mind turns from work. He bends into his spade visualizing a chilled pool. He lifts the spade and imagines the ocean he has never seen. He deposits the sand dreaming of rain showers, of purling streams, of the Nile’s cataracts, and of a marbled city whose every plaza and square is built around a gushing, splashing fountain. His saliva turns adhesive and his breathing becomes hurried, closely pursued by a weak, rapid pulse. His skin is hot and dry to the touch, almost papery. He becomes dizzy. He will faint. A man in the desert without water will die in very short order.

The lines of the Equilateral pass through landscapes drained of color and life. No desert scrub clots upon the hills. Turn over a rock and no reptile emerges. The morning sun rises unaccompanied by birdsong. The heat pours down in a torrent. From time to time the foremen lock the water tankers until the assigned quantity of sand has been excavated.

The open-minded reader may envisage another land whose waters are scarce, a dying land where the acquisition of a substance that he takes for granted is its inhabitants’ greatest imperative. The reader may contemplate creatures thirsty from the moment they are born to the moment they expire. In distant epochs they developed religious doctrines whose fires of fanaticism were stoked by this quest for water, faiths whose priests transported containers of water to places of adoration. The wars that have been fought over this cracked, blistered land—all of them essentially civil wars, each of them a struggle for simple existence—provoked brutalities that dwell on the race’s
conscience forever. But as the water shortage becomes now even more acute, these destructive impulses have been subsumed. The contest has become a supremely civilized one. It depends on worldwide cooperation, the rational organization of the classes of labor, individual altruism, the promotion of the sciences, and the elevation of irrigation science as the highest art.

Thayer has seen this planet of heroes, pale and fragile, trembling in his eyepiece.

Six

Only weeks earlier, as Earth and Mars moved into position on the same side of the sun, Thayer woke in a severe ague-fit, beginning with chills in the small of his back. Soon he was shivering down the length of his body and couldn’t rise from bed. Point A’s chief physician and three of his colleagues were summoned. They found him in a high fever. After examining his eyes and tongue, they left the tent to consult among themselves. A few minutes later Dr. McKinnon stepped in and asked Miss Keaton for permission to speak with her outside.

“Our consensus is that the fever most likely originates in a malarial process.”

Miss Keaton peered at him, trying to gauge the extent of his equivocation.

The doctor added, “The effects will pass. We can expect that he’ll return to his duties.”

“He’ll recover?”

Dr. McKinnon smiled, a gesture that brought the worried creases around his eyes into relief. Miss Keaton thought she saw fear. “We’re prescribing rest and a course of quinine. If the effects of the illness return, it may not be for months or years.”
He added, “Professor Thayer is indispensable. He’ll be provided with the best care possible.”

They left the astronomer in poor condition. His eyes were dull and he was too weak to leave his camp bed. Dissembling her own anxiety, Miss Keaton crisply issued orders to move her office adjacent to his sickroom. When they were alone, she told him, “Good work, Pho. You’re a true son of the desert now.”

Since Thayer fell ill, Miss Keaton has developed a low opinion of Point A’s physicians. They staff the infirmary and seem capable of treating the occasional cuts and bruises and mangled limbs brought in by the excavators, and they may detect malingerers, yet they have no systematic way of identifying and treating illness. They demonstrate little familiarity with tropical disease or even tropical heat, donning the same waistcoats as they did in London, Berlin, and Vienna. The physicians themselves are often flushed and short of breath.

Every morning and evening they return to confer in hushed voices, deferring to each other according to their seniority, professional attainment, and deportment. The doctors offer uncertain remedies and Miss Keaton gradually realizes that, although the field of medicine may heal and bring comfort, it’s unconstrained by the rigors of measurement and logic, unlike any science with which she’s familiar. Some observations of Thayer’s condition are ignored because they don’t conform to expectation; treatments are prescribed without empirical evidence that they correspond to the underlying illness; they’re discarded before they’ve been proven ineffective. She cloaks her anger. Assembling in Thayer’s sickroom two weeks after he first fell ill, the physicians agree again that Thayer is suffering from malaria.
There are murmurs of emphatic concurrence, amplified by averments in regards to etiology and symptomatology, followed by further concurrences. Then one of the doctors says, under his breath, to no one in particular, not even, it seems, to himself, that Thayer’s ailment may very well prove to be Kharga Fever.

The doctors are correct, however, in their expectation that the symptoms will pass. One morning a week after Ballard’s unfortunate visit, Thayer emerges in full desert kit, including military boots, khaki pants, a belted jacket, and a pith helmet. The color has returned to his face. Bint has given him a close shave and trimmed his brief red-brown mustache. The astronomer surveys the immediate neighborhood around his quarters. He’s disappointed that tents have gone slack and an unattended spade is buried to its shaft, but in the distance he can make out the blackness of the Vertex cutting into the horizon, and a pool of quicksilver miraging above it. He strides into Miss Keaton’s office and announces his intention to ride along Side AC out to mile 270.

Studying figures from the Point B pitch factory, she hasn’t heard him come in. She looks up now, surprised. He grins slyly.

Miss Keaton says, “It’s been taken care of.”

The diggers at mile 270, about forty miles from Point A, have encountered some limestone that escaped the notice of the surveyors, not the first rock or high dune or other impediment to do so. Ballard dispatched a blasting crew yesterday. She mentioned the problem last evening, but didn’t think Thayer heard her.

“Have they broken through?”

“There’s no reason for you to be there. If you’re well enough, you should write to Professor France-Lanord about the shadowing in Mare Australe.”

“The letter can wait,” Thayer insists. “I’ll be up and back by dinner.”

“You need to rest.”

An offended surprise momentarily occults his features. She realizes that he won’t acknowledge that he’s been ill, or that he’s been in bed with a fever. Or that the entire camp was made gravely anxious. Or that the Concession’s shares fell in London. She was obliged to cable daily bulletins directly to Sir Harry.

She says cautiously, “You feel well?”

“Of course I do.”

He stands before her in his natural easygoing defiance, his chest out, his chin tilted forward. When he’s well, he’s indomitable. This is the man who led the Lake Baikal expedition to view the 1887 solar eclipse. In 1890, with Miss Keaton and twenty mixed-race porters trailing, he crossed Chile’s Atacama Desert to witness stars coalescing from clouds of gas in the Southern Hemisphere nebulae. This is the man who, when in England, still coxes the crew that regularly defeats Oxford in the annual alumni regatta. This is the man who proposed, first to his stunned astronomical colleagues and then to the world, history’s most ambitious scientific endeavor, and the man who endured years of ridicule and calumny for it. This is the man who has brought the project to the verge of completion.

Nevertheless, Miss Keaton knows how to get around him, at least some of the time.

“Then play me! If you win, you’ll go. With some men and Dr. McKinnon.”

He gazes at her, unsmiling, while he considers the challenge.

“This is foolish, Dee,” he says, using his private name for her, an abbreviation for Deimos, the second moon of Mars. Sometimes when they’re alone she calls him Pho, for Phobos, its larger companion. “The day’s only getting warmer, time is being wasted as we argue,” he adds, but he’s already removing his helmet and loosening his jacket.

The table occupies its own tent, where it has been unvisited since the day Thayer fell ill. The vellum-lined battledores lie as they were after their last game, in which Miss Keaton defeated the astronomer decisively, twenty points to fifteen. Even after weeks of fever, Thayer certainly recalls the loss, which is why Miss Keaton has suggested a rematch. One of the paddles rests on a small black ball of India rubber.