chalkboard the dreadful news that The Times Literary Supplement had gone belly-up, an incoming datum which Renfrew found only slightly less interesting than the banana production of Borneo. The headlines gave no clue as to whether financial strains had caused the foldup, or—what seemed more likely to Renfrew by a long measure—whether it was the dearth of worthwhile books.
• • •
Johnny banged into the house, provoking an answering cry from his sister. Renfrew followed, feeling a bit clapped out from the cycling, and strangely depressed. He sat in his living room for a moment trying for once to think of nothing whatever, and failing. Half the room seemed totally unfamiliar to him. Antique glass paperweight, suspiciously tarnished candlestick, frilly lampshade with flower on it, Gauguin reprint, whimsical striped china pig on the hearth, brass rubbing of a medieval lady, beige china cat ashtray with poetic quotation written in flowing script round the rim. Hardly a square centimeter hadn’t been made sodding nice. About the time these registered, the persistent small tinny voice of Marjorie’s marauding radio got through to him, on again about the Nicaragua thing. The Americans were again trying to get approval from the motley crew of neighboring governments for a sea-level canal. To compete with the Panamanian one would seem dead easy, considering it was jammed up half the year. Renfrew remembered a BBC interview on just this subject, in which the sod from Argentina or somewhere had gone on at the American ambassador about why the Americans were called the Americans and those south of the USA not. The logic gradually unfurled to include the assumption that since the USAians had appropriated the American name, they would thus appropriate any new canal. The ambassador, not wise to the ways of the telly, had replied with a rational explanation. He noted that no South American nation included the word “America” in its name, and thus had no strong claim to it. The triviality of this point in the face of an avalanche of psychic energy from the Argentinian had put the ambassador far down in total points by the time the viewers phoned in their opinions of the discussion. Why, the ambassador fellow had scarcely smiled or mugged at the camera, or smacked a fist onto the table before him. How could he expect to have any media impact whatever?
He went in to find Marjorie rearranging the preserve jars for what appeared to be a third time. “Somehow, you know, it doesn’t look square,” she said to him with a distracted irritation. He sat at the kitchen table and poured himself some coffee, which, as expected, tasted rather like dog’s fur. It always did lately. “I’m sure it’s true,” he murmured. But then he studied her bustling form as she hoisted the cylinders of pale am, and indeed, the shelves did seem at a tilt. He had made them on a precise radial line extending dead to the center of the planet, geometrically impeccable and absolutely rational and quite beside the point. Their home was warped and swayed by the times it had passed through. Science came to nought in these days. This kitchen was the true local reference frame, the Galilean invariant. Yes. Watching his wife turn and mix the jars, Prussian rigidities standing on slabs of pine, he saw that it was the shelves which stood aslant now; the walls were right.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Peterson awoke and looked out of the window. The pilot had looped around to come in to San Diego from the ocean side. From this height most of the coastline north to Los Angeles was visible. That city was cloaked in its permanent haze; otherwise the day was clear and bright. The sun sparked flashes of brilliance from the windows of high-rise office blocks. Peterson stared vacantly at the sea. Tiny puckered lines of waves crawled imperceptibly toward the shore. Here and there, as the plane swung lower, he could see curves of white froth against the blue, vastly different from the ocean he had flown over the day before.
He had taken a commercial flight. From the air, the diatom bloom on the Atlantic had been horribly visible. It now extended over a hundred-kilometer diameter. Bloom was a good word for it, he thought wryly. It had looked like some giant flower, a scarlet camellia blossoming far off the shores of Brazil. His fellow passengers had been excited by the vision, stampeding from window to window to get a better view, asking agitated