Gregory Benford - The Fire this Time

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GREGORY BENFORD

THE FIRE THIS TIME

SCIENCE was invented once, and only once.

This is a singularly striking fact of human history. There were many

opportunities for science to emerge, in the sense that we know it -- the

reasonably dispassionate search for objective, checkable troths about the

physical world. The Egyptians and Babylonians had lots of rule-of-thumb

engineering and geometry. The Romans could build magnificently. The Chinese

invented paper, gunpowder, rockets, the great sailing vessels of the Ming era.

Yet none devised the rather abstract rules which govern scientific discourse.

No rival to Euclid's Elements. No deductive mathematics. No Chinese or Indian

or African theorems or proofs before they learned from Euclid.

Indeed, truly modern science emerged only half a millennium ago. The term

"science," from the Latin, "to know," is less than two centuries old. Before

that science existed but was called "natural philosophy." Science as we know

it came at the hands of William of Ockham, Francis Bacon, and then the great

experimenters, Galileo and his contemporaries. The crowning jewel was the

systematic, mathematical description of the most classically serene part of

the world, celestial dynamics, by Newton.

They all built on the Greeks, who invented the basic idea of the method. Along

the shore of that rough peninsula, over two thousand years ago, the methods of

careful reasoning, always braced by consultation with the facts of the matter,

evolved and won through.

Not that all Greeks held to it, of course. Aristotle lusted after the great

intellectual leaps. He was impatient with facts and seldom checked his many

assertions. Simple enough, one would think, to see if a heavy ball of the same

size as a light one fell to earth at a different rate. But it was nearly two

thousand years before Galileo looked to see, and found the truth.

I loved Greece and was immediately drawn to it. My first visit there led to an

entire novel about Mycenean archeology, Artifact. I grew up on a warm sea's

edge, and live in Laguna Beach, California now because I simply love the rub

and scent of the sea. More, I admire the cutting clarity of the air--sharper

than the Gulf coast where I grew up, but sharing a smell of brine and eternal

organic consequence.

I sometimes think that the Greeks developed their Euclidean certainties, their

sharp visions of cause and circumscribed effect, because they lived in an air

of razor clarity. The dry, lucid accuracies of Athenian air may have kindled

in the ancient mind some vision of a realm beyond the raw rub of the day, a

province of the eternal which obeyed finer laws, more graceful dynamics.

I thought this particularly because I was preparing, in late October of 1993,

the notes for a course in ethics which I would soon teach in the honors

humanities program at the University of California, Irvine. (Usually ethics is

strictly a matter for the humanists, but for the past five years I have served

as the token scientist in the honors courses.) It struck me how strongly Plato

believed in smooth certainties lying behind our rude world, the famous shadows

on the cave wall analogy. Socrates believed in higher ethical laws, too, which

men could but crudely glimpse and try to copy. Idealism emerged in the sharp

air of civilization's morning.

Somehow that city-state of a quarter million population produced an immense

flowering in art, literature, philosophy- and science. Many cultures yield up

art, music, and higher thought generally. But only the Greeks put together

science. I wondered why.

I saw the smoke as I went to my one PM lecture on a blustery Wednesday,

October 27. The spire of oily black smoke was about seven miles inland, I

judged, near the freeway, far from my home in Laguna Beach. Dry winds off the

desert called the Santa Anas brought an eerie, skin-prick-ling apprehension to

the sharp air.

By the time I had held forth on turbulence theory for an hour and a half, a

dark cloud loomed across all the southern horizon. The brush fire had swept to

the sea. On the telephone my wife Joan said the smell was already heavy and

asked me to come home.

I tried to reach Laguna Beach by the Pacific Coast Highway, only to be turned

back by a policeman at the campus edge. So I went south, looping the long way

around, leaving the freeway and threading through surface streets. When I had

bought my Mercedes 560 SL my son had deplored its excess power, quite

ecologically unsound, and I had replied lightly that I wanted to "seize

opportunities." Here was the chance: I cut through traffic, hoping to get

ahead of the predictable wedge wanting the only access to town.

I failed, of course. Traffic was chaotic. I took two hours to reach Monarch

Bay, the community immediately south of Laguna Beach. At Monarch Bay the

police stopped everyone. Smoke glowered across the entire horizon now.

I left my car at 5:30 and hiked north, striking up a conversation with a man,

Dave Adams, who was walking to his nearby home. I stopped there for a drink

and heard that the high school had burned. Our house sits three hundred meters

above the school. On the other hand, this was media wisdom, instantly

discounted. I went on, hitchhiking and walking the five miles to central

Laguna by seven PM. Police were turning everyone back but the acrid flavor in

the air alarmed me, and the dark clouds blowing thickly out to sea seemed to

come from our hill. The police stopped me several times. I always retreated,

then worked my way around to another street and went on.

I knew that Joan must have evacuated by then, but I had set out to come home

and just kept at it, through the gathering pall. Maybe there was something I

could do -fight the fire, water down the yard, rescue some precious

memories...

On Wendt Street, near the high school, a police car came cruising down,

herding the few homeowners left. I ducked behind a stone wall. "Get out of my

driveway!" a man wearing a headphone radio shouted at me. He waved a pistol

wildly -- a part of me noted, .$2 revolver, finger on the trigger guard,

probably knows how to handle it -- and I realized he perhaps mistook me for a

looter. I ran behind the police car and down a street, following the narrow

windings toward our hill. Night had fallen.

I sprinted on -- excited, oblivious to choking smoke, sirens and hoarse cries.

At the high school -untouched, of course -- I met fire teams and more police.

Chaos. Flames leapt from our hill, a steady popping roar. Homes exploded in

orange as their roofs burst open. Yellows and reds traced out the dark

discords of walls collapsing, brush crackling, cinders churning up in cyclonic

winds, orange motes in a fountain of air -then falling, bright tumbling

fireworks. Ash swept through the streets like gray snow. Above it all a cowl

of black smoke poured out to sea.

I crossed the street and climbed up onto a high ledge and still could not see

far enough up Mystic Canyon to make out our house. But all around it homes

burned furiously. Our street, Skyline Drive, was a flaming artery both above

and below our house.

A fire warden shouted at me to get out. I hesitated, he shouted again, and I

realized it was all over. At last I gave up our house and turned away. I had

been rushing forward for several hours, intent on reaching home. That was

impossible. I could do nothing in this inferno. I had not gotten in anybody's

way, but I hadn't done any good, either. Working my way this close to the

fires was risky, if only from the smoke I inhaled. Slowly I realized that I

had been running on automatic, and all this was quite foolish.

I retreated through deserted streets. I hitchhiked partway back out and a few

miles south found a 7-Eleven open. An incongruous sight, bright beacon beside

the exodus. I was parched, sagging. I went in and straight to the back to get

a big container of cold tea.

The store owner was in a heated argument with two men who wanted to get

gasoline. Police had come by and ordered the pumps closed. Excited, the owner

started rattling off Korean and one of the men grabbed him by the shin collar

and pulled him halfway across the counter. More shouting. The owner got free

and backed away and the rest of us in the store yelled at the two men. They

swore at the owner but made no more moves.

Plenty of talk then, accusations and retorts and barks of angry egos. I judged

it was not going to get any worse so I left money on the counter and walked

out with the tea. A block further south six motorcycle police from Newport

Beach sat on their machines and watched people still leaving along the Coast

Highway, their uniforms pressed and neat. They weren't interested in the 7-

Eleven.

I finished the tea before I reached the Adams home. They all watched the

television news and I drank some more. My thirst would not go away. I sat and

listened to the announcer declare that all homes in the Mystic Hills were

lost. All. Confirmation sent me into a daze.

I called friends, who reported that Joan had indeed evacuated town and come to

them, and then went on to the refugee center. Dave Adams drove me to the

center and I found Joan. She was in better shape mentally and physically than

I. I sat on a curb and ate my first fast food burger ever, from a free canteen

run by In 'n Out. It was improbably delicious.

Joan had evacuated as flames marched over the ridge line of the hill across

the street, coming as fast as a person walks. She had stuffed her Volvo with

financial documents, vital but small items like safety deposit keys, passports

and telephone directories, plus our photo albums, the oldest of our Japanese

woodblock prints, jewelry, and cherished oddments of our accumulated history.

She had been putting the pets in the car when a guy walked up and asked if she

needed help loading things in the car. She suspected he was in fact interested

in getting into the house, so said no thanks. He ambled away. Just as she was

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GREGORYBENFORDTHEFIRETHISTIMESCIENCEwasinventedonce,andonlyonce.Thisisasingularlystrikingfactofhuman...

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