Scientific discovery and the miraculous invention are integral
parts of the science fiction universe. Mr. Shaw's ingenious
“slow glass” is a superior example of this type of story
because it is not content merely to suggest a startlingly novel
concept, but goes on to examine its impact on people.
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 an incredibly 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.
They were fascinating, but Selina and I didn't mention the
windows. I think we hated each other so much we both were
reluctant to sully anything new by drawing it into the nexus of
our emotions. The holiday, I had begun to realize, was a stupid
idea in the first place. I had thought it would cure everything,
but, of course, it didn't stop Selina being pregnant and, worse
still, it didn't even stop her being angry about being
pregnant.
Rationalizing our dismay over her condition, we had circulated
the usual statements to the effect that we would have
liked having children—but later on, at the proper
time. Selina's pregnancy had cost us her well-paid job and with it
the new house we had been negotiating and which was far beyond the
reach of my income from poetry. But the real source of our
annoyance was that we were face to face with the realization that
people who say they want children later always mean they want
children never. Our nevers were thrumming with the knowledge that
we, who had thought ourselves so unique, had fallen into the same
biological trap as every mindless rutting creature which ever
existed.
The road took us along the southern slopes of Ben Cruachan until
we began to catch glimpses of the gray Atlantic far ahead. I had
just cut our speed to absorb the view better when I noticed the
sign spiked to a gatepost. It said “SLOW GLASS—QUALITY
HIGH, PRICES LOW—J. R. HAGAN.” On an impulse I stopped
the car on the verge, wincing slightly as tough grasses whipped
noisily at the bodywork.
“Why have we stopped?” Selina's neat, smoke-silver head
turned in surprise.
“Look at that sign. Let's go up and see what there is. The
stuff might be reasonably priced out here.”
Selina's voice was pitched high with scorn as she refused, but I
was too taken with my idea to listen. I had an illogical
conviction that doing something extravagant and crazy would set us
right again.
“Come on,” I said, “the exercise might do us some good.
We've been driving too long anyway.”
She shrugged in a way that hurt me and got out of the car. We
walked up a path made of irregular, packed clay steps nosed with
short lengths of sapling. The path curved through trees which
clothed the edge of the hill and at its end we found a low
farmhouse. Beyond the little stone building tall frail frames of
slow glass gazed out toward the voice-stilling sight of Cruachan's
ponderous descent toward the waters of Loch Linnhe. Most of the
panes were perfectly transparent but a few were dark, like panels
of polished ebony.
As we approached the house through a neat cobbled yard a tall
middle-aged man in ash-colored tweeds arose and waved to us. He
had been sitting on the low rubble wall which bounded the yard,
smoking a pipe and staring toward the house. At the front window
of the cottage a young woman in a tangerine dress stood with a
small boy in her arms, but she turned uninterestedly and moved out
of sight as we drew near.
“Mr. Hagan?” I guessed.
“Correct. Come to see some glass, have you? Well, you've come
to the right place.” Hagan spoke crisply, with traces of the
pure Highland which sounds so much like Irish to the unaccustomed
ear. He had one of those calmly dismayed faces one finds on
elderly road menders and philosophers.
“Yes,” I said. “We're on holiday. We saw your
sign.”
Selina, who usually has a natural fluency with strangers, said
nothing. She was looking toward the now empty window with what I
thought was a slightly puzzled expression.
“Up from London, are you? Well, as I said, you've come to the
right place—and at the right time, too. My wife and I don't
see many people this early in the season.”
I laughed. “Does that mean we might be able to buy a little
glass without mortgaging our home?”
“Look at that now,” Hagan said, smiling helplessly. “I've
thrown away any advantage I might have had in the transaction.
Rose, that's my wife, says I never learn. Still, let's sit down
and talk it over.” He pointed at the rubble wall, then glanced
doubtfully at Selina's immaculate blue skirt. “Wait till I fetch
a rug from the house.” Hagan limped quickly into the cottage,
closing the door behind him.
“Perhaps it wasn't such a marvelous idea to come up here,” I
whispered to Selina, “but you might at least be pleasant to the
man. I think I can smell a bargain.”
“Some hope,” she said with deliberate coarseness. “Surely
even you must have noticed that ancient dress his wife is wearing!
He won't give much away to strangers.”
“Was that his wife?”
“Of course that was his wife.”
“Well, well,” I said, surprised. “Anyway, try to be civil
with him. I don't want to be embarrassed.”
Selina snorted, but she smiled whitely when Hagan reappeared and
I relaxed a little. Strange how a man can love a woman and yet at
the same time pray for her to fall under a train.
Hagan spread a tartan blanket on the wall and we sat down,
feeling slightly self-conscious at having been translated from our
city-oriented lives into a rural tableau. On the distant slate of
the Loch, beyond the watchful frames of slow glass, a slow-moving
steamer drew a white line toward the south. The boisterous
mountain air seemed almost to invade our lungs, giving us more
oxygen than we required.
“Some of the glass farmers around here,” Hagan began,
“give strangers, such as yourselves, a sales talk about how
beautiful the autumn is in this part of Argyll. Or it might be the
spring, or the winter. I don't do that—any fool knows that
a place which doesn't look right in summer never looks right. What
do you say?”
I nodded compliantly.
“I want you just to take a good look out toward Mull,
Mr….”
“Garland.”
“…Garland. That's what you're buying if you buy my
glass, and it never looks better than it does at this minute. The
glass is in perfect phase, none of it is less than ten years
thick—and a four-foot window will cost you two hundred
pounds.”
“Two hundred!” Selina was shocked. “That's as
much as they charge at the Scenedow shop in Bond Street.”
Hagan smiled patiently, then looked closely at me to see if I
knew enough about slow glass to appreciate what he had been
saying. His price had been much higher than I had
hoped—but ten years thick! The cheap glass one
found in places like the Vistaplex and Pane-o-rama stores usually
consisted of a quarter of an inch of ordinary glass faced with a
veneer of slow glass perhaps only ten or twelve months thick.
“You don't understand, darling,” I said, already determined
to buy. “This glass will last ten years and it's in
phase.”
“Doesn't that only mean it keeps time?”
Hagan smiled at her again, realizing he had no further necessity
to bother with me. “Only, you say! Pardon me, Mrs. Garland, but
you don't seem to appreciate the miracle, the genuine
honest-to-goodness miracle, of engineering precision needed to
produce a piece of glass in phase. When I say the glass is ten
years thick it means it takes light ten years to pass through it.
In effect, each one of those panes is ten light-years
thick—more than twice the distance to the nearest
star—so a variation in actual thickness of only a millionth
of an inch would….”
He stopped talking for a moment and sat quietly looking toward
the house. I turned my head from the view of the Loch and saw the
young woman standing at the window again. Hagan's eyes were filled
with a kind of greedy reverence which made me feel uncomfortable
and at the same time convinced me Selina had been wrong. In my
experience husbands never looked at wives that way—at
least, not at their own.
The girl remained in view for a few seconds, dress glowing
warmly, then moved back into the room. Suddenly I received a
distinct, though inexplicable, impression she was blind. My
feeling was that Selina and I were perhaps blundering through an
emotional interplay as violent as our own.
“I'm sorry,” Hagan continued; “I thought Rose was going to
call me for something. Now, where was I, Mrs. Garland? Ten
light-years compressed into a quarter of an inch
means….”
* * *
I ceased to listen, partly because I was already sold, partly
because I had heard the story of slow glass many times before and
had never yet understood the principles involved. An acquaintance
with scientific training had once tried to be helpful by telling
me to visualize a pane of slow glass as a hologram which did not
need coherent light from a laser for the reconstitution of its
visual information, and in which every photon of ordinary light
passed through a spiral tunnel coiled outside the radius of
capture of each atom in the glass. This gem of, to me,
incomprehensibility not only told me nothing, it convinced me once
again that a mind as nontechnical as mine should concern itself
less with causes than effects.
The most important effect, in the eyes of the average individual,
was that light took a long time to pass through a sheet of slow
glass. A new piece was always jet black because nothing had yet
come through, but one could stand the glass beside, say, a
woodland lake until the scene emerged, perhaps a year later. If
the glass was then removed and installed in a dismal city flat,
the flat would—for that year—appear to overlook the
woodland lake. During the year it wouldn't be merely a very
realistic but still picture—the water would ripple in
sunlight, silent animals would come to drink, birds would cross
the sky, night would follow day, season would follow season. Until
one day, a year later, the beauty held in the subatomic pipelines
would be exhausted and the familiar gray cityscape would
reappear.
Apart from its stupendous novelty value, the commercial success
of slow glass was founded on the fact that having a scenedow was
the exact emotional equivalent of owning land. The meanest cave
dweller could look out on misty parks—and who was to say
they weren't his? A man who really owns tailored gardens and
estates doesn't spend his time proving his ownership by crawling
on his ground, feeling, smelling, tasting it. All he receives from
the land are light patterns, and with scenedows those patterns
could be taken into coal mines, submarines, prison cells.
On several occasions I have tried to write short pieces about the
enchanted crystal but, to me, the theme is so ineffably poetic as
to be, paradoxically, beyond the reach of poetry—mine, at
any rate. Besides, the best songs and verse had already been
written, with prescient inspiration, by men who had died long
before slow glass was discovered. I had no hope of equaling, for
example, Moore with his:
Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
Fond Memory brings the light
Of other days around me…
It took only a few years for slow glass to develop from a
scientific curiosity to a sizable industry. And much to the
astonishment of us poets—those of us who remain convinced
that beauty lives though lilies die—the trappings of that
industry were no different from those of any other. There were
good scenedows which cost a lot of money, and there were inferior
scenedows which cost rather less. The thickness, measured in
years, was an important factor in the cost but there was also the
question of actual thickness, or phase.
Even with the most sophisticated engineering techniques available
thickness control was something of a hit-and-miss affair. A coarse
discrepancy could mean that a pane intended to be five years thick
might be five and a half, so that light which entered in summer
emerged in winter; a fine discrepancy could mean that noon
sunshine emerged at midnight. These incompatibilities had their
peculiar charm—many night workers, for example, liked
having their own private time zones—but, in general, it
cost more to buy scenedows which kept closely in step with real
time.
* * *
Selina still looked unconvinced when Hagan had finished speaking.
She shook her head almost imperceptibly and I knew he had been
using the wrong approach. Quite suddenly the pewter helmet of her
hair was disturbed by a cool gust of wind, and huge clean tumbling
drops of rain began to spang round us from an almost cloudless
sky.
“I'll give you a check now,” I said abruptly, and saw
Selina's green eyes triangulate angrily on my face. “You can
arrange delivery?”
“Aye, delivery's no problem,” Hagan said, getting to his
feet. “But wouldn't you rather take the glass with you?”
“Well, yes—if you don't mind.” I was shamed by his
readiness to trust my scrip.
“I'll unclip a pane for you. Wait here. It won't take long to
slip it into a carrying frame.” Hagan limped down the slope
toward the seriate windows, through some of which the view toward
Linnhe was sunny, while others were cloudy and a few pure
black.
Selina drew the collar of her blouse closed at her throat. “The
least he could have done was invite us inside. There can't be so
many fools passing through that he can afford to neglect
them.”
I tried to ignore the insult and concentrated on writing the
check. One of the outsized drops broke across my knuckles,
splattering the pink paper.
“All right,” I said, “let's move in under the eaves till
he gets back.” You worm, I thought as I felt the whole
thing go completely wrong. I just had to be a fool to marry
you. A prize fool, a fool's fool—and now that you've
trapped part of me inside you I'll never ever, never ever,
never ever get away.
Feeling my stomach clench itself painfully, I ran behind Selina
to the side of the cottage. Beyond the window the neat living
room, with its coal fire, was empty but the child's toys were
scattered on the floor. Alphabet blocks and a wheelbarrow the
exact color of freshly pared carrots. As I stared in, the boy came
running from the other room and began kicking the blocks. He
didn't notice me. A few moments later the young woman entered the
room and lifted him, laughing easily and wholeheartedly as she
swung the boy under her arm. She came to the window as she had
done earlier. I smiled self-consciously, but neither she nor the
child responded.
My forehead prickled icily. Could they both he blind? I
sidled away.
Selina gave a little scream and I spun towards her.
“The rug!” she said. “It's getting soaked.”
She ran across the yard in the rain, snatched the reddish square
from the dappling wall and ran back, toward the cottage door.
Something heaved convulsively in my subconscious.
“Selina,” I shouted. “Don't open it!”
But I was too late. She had pushed open the latched wooden door
and was standing, hand over mouth, looking into the cottage. I
moved close to her and took the rug from her unresisting
fingers.
As I was closing the door I let my eyes traverse the cottage's
interior. The neat living room in which I had just seen the woman
and child was, in reality, a sickening clutter of shabby
furniture, old newspapers, cast-off clothing and smeared dishes.
It was damp, stinking and utterly deserted. The only object I
recognized from my view through the window was the little
wheelbarrow, paintless and broken.
I latched the door firmly and ordered myself to forget what I had
seen. Some men who live alone are good housekeepers; others just
don't know how.
Selina's face was white. “I don't understand. I don't
understand it.”
“Slow glass works both ways,” I said gently. “Light passes
out of a house, as well as in.”
“You mean…?”
“I don't know. It isn't our business. Now steady
up—Hagan's coming back with our glass.” The churning in
my stomach was beginning to subside.
Hagan came into the yard carrying an oblong, plastic-covered
frame. I held the check out to him, but he was staring at Selina's
face. He seemed to know immediately that our uncomprehending
fingers had rummaged through his soul. Selina avoided his gaze.
She was old and ill-looking, and her eyes stared determinedly
toward the nearing horizon.
“I'll take the rug from you, Mr. Garland,” Hagan finally
said. “You shouldn't have troubled yourself over it.”
“No trouble. Here's the check.”
“Thank you.” He was still looking at Selina with a strange
kind of supplication. “It's been a pleasure to do business with
you.”
“The pleasure was mine,” I said with equal, senseless
formality. I picked up the heavy frame and guided Selina toward
the path which led to the road. Just as we reached the head of the
now slippery steps Hagan spoke again.
“Mr. Garland!”
I turned unwillingly.
“It wasn't my fault,” he said steadily. “A hit-and-run
driver got them both, down on the Oban road six years ago. My boy
was only seven when it happened. I'm entitled to keep
something.”
I nodded wordlessly and moved down the path, holding my wife
close to me, treasuring the feel of her arms locked around me. At
the bend I looked back through the rain and saw Hagan sitting with
squared shoulders on the wall where we had first seen him.
He was looking at the house, but I was unable to tell if there
was anyone at the window.