When Stephen Valentine talks to real-estate agents, he uses a made-up name. He doesn’t want them to say that no land is available because they have looked him up and don’t like the sound of his project. He tells them that he represents a biotech company. He doesn’t say what the company plans to build, but he gives the impression that it is a factory or a headquarters, and that for the sake of security the company would like it to be surrounded by a few hundred acres of empty land. He tells them that the site “has to be inspirational.” He asks them to imagine that the Pope is building a summer palace. The real-estate agents often refer him to state agencies whose purpose is to attract biotech companies, and sometimes he ends up leaving New York, where he lives, and being met at an airport by friendly people who have a big helicopter.
Valentine is an architect. He has worked for I. M. Pei. At Pei’s office, he took part in designing the Jacob Javits Center, in New York, and he was one of four architects on the initial design team for the Holocaust Museum, in Washington, D.C. Typically, architects are given a site and asked to design a building to occupy it. In 1997, Valentine was asked by a man named Saul Kent to draw up plans for a building he had no property for. Kent lives in California and has a company called the Life Extension Foundation, which sells health products and supports research intended to help people live extravagantly long lives and maybe not die at all. Finding a site is a matter that he has left to Valentine.
Kent wanted a building sufficiently stable that it could operate continuously for at least a hundred years, a condition that no building in the world can satisfy. Buildings designed to remain standing after an earthquake, for example, are not expected to do so without having to be shut down for repairs. The bunkers that countries build to protect their leaders are not intended to perform without fail for a century. Usually, they are abandoned for new ones after twenty-five years. Robert Ducibella, a security consultant at Ducibella Venter & Santore, whose clients include the Statue of Liberty, the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve banking system, former President Clinton, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center), has studied Valentine’s models and drawings and is impressed by the novelty of the project’s complications. “There are buildings built by academic institutions that need to preserve cultural collections for a hundred years, maybe, but the expectation is that fifty years is more likely,” he says. “There are medical facilities that have reserves they need protected, the Food and Drug Administration wants its records preserved, the Federal Reserve doesn’t want its resources tampered with, and Social Security doesn’t, either. There are aspects of this building in other buildings, but nowhere else in the world can they all be found in one place.”
Valentine calls his building the Timeship. It will enclose seven hundred thousand square feet, some of which will be built underground, and it will cost about two hundred million dollars, a portion of which is already in hand and the rest of which Kent hopes to raise by donation. The building’s plans include premises for an organ bank, laboratories for research devoted to anti-aging science, archives of DNA from extinct and near-extinct species, and nearly fifty thousand people who have been frozen in the hope that they can be brought back to life in the future. The Timeship is low and square, with a huge circular wall around it. Beyond the wall are eight rings of concrete whose widths increase according to the golden proportion, a series of numbers in which each number is the sum of the two numbers before it: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on. In the center of the Timeship, and visible above the wall, is a tower in the shape of a cone, whose summit is intersected by a second cone, which is inverted. Around the base of the tower is a large square plaza. A mist so fine that a person walking through it will not get wet will drift through the plaza. The mist is intended to contribute an ethereal atmosphere—“the intermediate world between the formal and the non-formal,” Valentine writes in the building’s proposal. In the air above the plaza, the mist will form clouds, representing “the abode of the gods of creation.” The outside of the wall has a zigzag pattern meant to suggest flames and thunderbolts and the notion that “to pass through fire symbolizes transcending the human condition.” The people will be stored in containers below the plaza, in private areas called neighborhoods.
Valentine believes that the Timeship must be built in a beautiful landscape, otherwise people won’t think of it as an appealing place to spend what might be eternity. He wanted to build the Timeship in Tuscany, but he decided that the United States is more likely than Italy to be politically stable for the next hundred years. He has been looking at sites for two years, and he estimates that he has seen hundreds of them. He has narrowed his search to four states, but, except to say that all of them are in the lower half of the country, he won’t tell which they are. He eliminated the other forty-six by mapping the hazards and threats they contained. His maps took account of earthquakes, snowfall, rock slides, avalanches, tornadoes, hailstorms, flash floods, volcanoes, hurricanes, sinkholes, lightning strikes, rogue glaciers, and showers of meteors. He also made note of weaknesses in the ozone layer, sources of geothermal energy, wind patterns, pockets of radon gas, rising water levels, concentrations of lead and other metal pollutants, groundwater poisons from landfills and industrial dumps, crime, and the possibility of terrorist attacks, either from animal-rights activists who may disapprove of research carried on at the Timeship or from radicals who believe it is somehow involved with the government. In addition, he marked the locations of nuclear power plants and military bases, since they might be targets in a war; airports, for access; and the layouts of roads. In a nuclear war, the Timeship could run on its own for six months, so long as an atomic bomb falls no closer to it than twenty miles. Valentine figures that if no one can respond to a service call in six months the game is probably up anyway.
Valentine is forty-nine. Since the late seventies, he has subscribed to a magazine called The Futurist, which covers emerging trends, especially in science and technology. He has saved every issue. One of them discusses cryonics, the speculative practice of freezing human beings in the hope of reviving them. Valentine occasionally teaches, and, when he does, he likes to pose philosophical questions to his students. “Do you design the future, or does the future design you?” he asks. Sometimes he takes a poll to determine how many students would be willing to be frozen and brought back a hundred years later. Valentine does not plan to have his remains frozen, but in the early nineties he heard that a group interested in cryonics met once a month on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—fifteen or twenty people occupying folding chairs in a second- or third-floor rented room, a speaker, and maybe some slides. Out of curiosity, he began attending. A woman who took part introduced him to Saul Kent.
Valentine was remotely aware of Kent’s modest notoriety—the result of a few staredowns with the government, all of which he won. The first occurred in February, 1987, when the F.D.A. raided his company in Florida and took half a million dollars’ worth of vitamins and computers. Kent, they said, was telling customers that the vitamins could cure certain afflictions. Making claims about vitamins was illegal. The prosecution they threatened, however, was eventually abandoned. A more dramatic event took place in December of 1987, and involved the death, in California, of Kent’s mother, Dora, who was eighty-three. Her health had been failing, and when she seemed close to death Kent moved her to the premises of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a laboratory that froze people, so that her remains could be preserved quickly; Kent was a member of Alcor’s board. Mrs. Kent, once a seamstress, lived a day and a half longer, and when she died, without a doctor present, a lab worker immediately placed her on a heart-and-lung machine to keep her blood circulating. She was also at some point injected with Nembutal so that she wouldn’t revive. Then she was preserved as a neurosuspension—that is, simply a head. The doctor who signed her death certificate four days later said she had died of pneumonia. The coroner said maybe the barbiturate had killed her. He asked the laboratory for Mrs. Kent’s head, but the laboratory didn’t have it; Kent said he gave it to a friend, who had it hidden in his house. The D. A. threatened to prosecute for murder. A judge said he couldn’t demand that the head be thawed for an autopsy, and in the end there were no charges.
One day in 1997, Valentine’s phone rang and it was Kent asking if he was interested in designing a cryonic facility. Kent wanted to build such a place as part of “a comprehensive plan to conquer aging and death.” He hired Valentine because he was impressed by his work and his enthusiasm for such an unconventional project. Kent gave Valentine ten weeks to deliver a proposal. Valentine took an office in SoHo, where he worked seven days a week and roughly seventeen hours a day. He says that over the next two and a half months he did “a million dollars’ worth of work for the price of a car.” The first thing that occurred to him was that no example existed of the building he was trying to design—one that was impregnable but also beautiful. He looked at pictures of castles and forts and at missile bases, because they were secure. He looked at prisons and bunkers, but decided they were too gloomy to provide inspiration. He looked at memorials such as the Pyramids and the Taj Mahal. He watched every one of the six or eight movies that showed people being frozen and brought back to life. He engaged several architecture students as interns and gave them assignments to find anything they could on subjects such as immortality, rainbows, fibre optics, and holy places. “I was trying to be bombarded with information,” he says. “Just be saturated.” Meanwhile, he was concerned that if the other people in the building knew what he was working on they might disapprove and maybe even vandalize his office. Most of the firms were film companies, with their names or the names of the projects they were pursuing on the door. Valentine put a sign on his door that read “Frosty the Snowman in the Timeship,” which he thought sounded like a movie. He wore a white jumpsuit, with “Frosty” stencilled on the back. Late at night, he sanded and painted his model of the Timeship in the hallway to keep the dust from settling on the computers in the office; then he swept the halls, so that they would be clean when the rest of the tenants arrived in the morning.
Kent liked the model of the Timeship, but he thought that the science necessary for cryonics to succeed wasn’t yet in place. Valentine put the Timeship in a big box and locked it in a bin at Manhattan Mini Storage on West Twenty-ninth Street, among stalls rented by actors temporarily on the Coast and by African street venders who sell carved heads and incense and skin drums.
Valentine is about five feet nine. He has thick black hair that he combs back from his forehead, and it stands straight up, like a crop. His eyes are pale gray, and their expression is alert and avid. He lives by himself in an apartment in the East Forties, and has never married, because he believes that a family would distract him from his work. One of the last women he dated was a Rockette. He belongs to the species of architect which regards the profession as a calling. He especially likes Ayn Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead.” Seth Weine, an architect who has known Valentine for almost thirty years, says, “Stephen really bought into Rand’s version of the architect as hero, creator, and ethical person not willing to compromise if compromise involves lowered standards.” Valentine is fond of a line from “The Fountainhead” which says, “A house can have integrity, just like a person, and just as seldom.” Although he has travelled all over the world and lived in Hong Kong for three years, his life in the city is deeply place-bound. His current office is on the same block as his apartment. He tends to favor restaurants that are close to home, and the boundaries he travels within are so compact that it is as if he were living on a ship. A trip to other precincts he regards as a burden. When friends invite him to visit, he usually says, “Forget it, I’m sick, I don’t feel well.”
Valentine grew up in Norwood, Massachusetts, near Cape Cod, and he has a Boston accent. He says “idear,” and “Korear,” and “Cuber,” the way John Kennedy did. His father, Fred, was an aviation mechanic and the vice-president of a small airline; he worked at the Norwood airport. Valentine’s mother, Dora, kept house and raised him and his two brothers and two sisters; Valentine is the second child. According to his mother, “Stephen’s brothers and sisters were more the standard child and everything as how you’re supposed to do it, the normal sequence of events. Stephen was a live wire, constantly going and doing.” When he was three, he nearly set his family’s house on fire. “I had hold of this cigarette lighter with a big silver top that belonged to my parents, and first I was just playing with it as an object, then lighting it to see the flame, then touching it to paper and putting it out with my fingers,” he says. “Then I touched it experimentally to the nylon drape and it went up like gasoline. My mother was upstairs asleep, and the phone rang, and a neighbor said, ‘Your son’s running naked up the street, and there’s smoke coming from your house.’’’
Valentine was otherwise a solemn child. “It is rare to see a first grader who is such a perfectionist,” his teacher wrote on his report card. “This asset will overcome many difficulties he may encounter.” On a landing in his office, Valentine has a sign that says, “Countless unseen details are often the only difference between mediocre and magnificent.” He thinks that the exquisite specificity of his attention is the result of watching his father at work. “My father had people’s lives at stake,” he says. “Everything he did had to be done with real pressure and carefulness.”
Valentine’s mother says that he was never much interested by stories—“Nothing made-up,” she says—but that he liked books about rockets and space travel and machines, and in the second grade he had a teacher who drove into Boston on weekends to pick up science books for him at the library. He was able to build model airplanes and cars simply by studying the pictures on the boxes. He didn’t speak in sentences until he was four. If he happened to be in the kitchen, and saw something he wanted, he tended to make noises and point. “His talent isn’t really the kind that’s found on standardized tests,” his mother says. “They did have one test that was for spatial, though, and he really did a tremendous job on spatial.” He was always very creative, she says, and persistent when he thought he was right. “What you might call on the edge of stubbornness,” she says. “If he believed in something, he went ahead and proved it.”
Valentine’s language is frequently idiosyncratic. He often talks rapidly, then stops. “I’m lost over words here,” he’ll say, and shake his head. Occasionally, he combines two words into a third one that he makes up. Once, when he meant to say that he thought another architect’s work was both insignificant and inconsequential, he said, “It’s insequential.” Another time, dismissing a designer as a mere decorator, he said, “He’s a desocrator.” I have heard him say that someone’s character is “above approach,” or that he “flowed” to Texas when he flew, or that God sometimes engages in “divine devention,” or that the sky above the ocean at night, seen from a sailboat, is “celestreal, very.” Once, when he was worried that I might take a remark in a way he hadn’t intended, he said sympathetically, “Please don’t get offensive about it.”
As a teen-ager, Valentine worked weekends and summers at the Norwood airport, helping the mechanics and cleaning up around the shop. “I could go into the hangar and work on power equipment and with sheet-metal presses,” he says. “It was like a candy store.” In high school, he thought he’d one day like to race cars or become a fighter pilot. For a science fair, he built a model of a building, and, when an architect from Boston admired it, he began to think he might want to be an architect. He applied to the Rhode Island School of Design but didn’t get in, and went to Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, instead. He viewed himself as a boy from a small town, and thought that the city would broaden him.
Valentine arrived at Pratt in 1972. John Lobell, one of his teachers, says, “He was a very bright and innovative designer. You could see he was determined to make the best of the experience.” When Valentine graduated, he won the American Institute of Architects’ School Medal. “The school of architecture had a ceremony, and they gave Stephen the medal,” his father says. “Well, I’m from Missouri when it comes to that stuff—I didn’t really know what it meant—but what stuck with me is later that day only a few graduates got to go to the president’s house, and the president came up to me and said, ‘We expect great things from your son.’ I almost went through the floor when he said that.”
Valentine was also invited to spend a week at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, with five other students from around the country and several prominent architects, Michael Graves among them. Afterward, Valentine came back to New York and looked for work. At an unemployment office, he found a listing for a position at a firm and ended up doing drawings for Trump Tower. For the next six years, he worked for a series of firms, mainly on office buildings.
In 1984, he began working in Pei’s office, where he came under the influence of James Ingo Freed, the architect of the Javits Center. The least difficult part of a building to design is the body. The most difficult parts are the corners and edges, where everything has to meet and fit. Valentine did drawings of the space-frame structure, which, he says, “is another term for corners and edges.” After the project was finished, Freed asked Valentine to join him, another architect, and a project manager as members of the initial design team for the Holocaust Museum. “We were on the same wavelength,” Freed says. “He was a young man with strong ideas, able to take issues and give them form, and that’s a very important talent to have.”
Eventually, Freed asked Valentine to solve the engineering difficulties posed by the huge skylight above the museum’s Hall of Witness. The skylight has a long diagonal transverse. The mechanical complications were so intricate that the drawings took fifteen months, and when they were finished Valentine resigned. The work had exhausted him. In the back of a magazine about sailboats, he saw an ad for a service that assembled crews to deliver boats to their owners across the Atlantic. Through the service, he got a position as a crew member on a sixty-foot boat. He didn’t know how to sail. The rest of the crew consisted of a young man and his fiancée. As they left port, the captain put a pistol on a table in the galley, and said that if there were any problems he would be the judge, jury, and executioner. The trip took thirty-three days, and by the end of it the couple were no longer engaged.
Valentine remembers that after he returned to New York, in the fall of 1990, he saw a notice in the Times, announcing a competition for the design of a resort and conference center in Japan. He entered drawings and won. The resort was to be called Super Paradise. The construction budget was several billion dollars. “I went to Japan to present the model, and I was treated like royalty,” he says. “I was like Pei. Pei for a day.” To complete the drawings, Valentine took an office on the sixty-fifth floor of a building on Fifty-seventh Street. In 1991, the Japanese economy fell apart, and the resort was cancelled.
After Super Paradise, a project Valentine had controlled, he was reluctant to work for someone else. He gave a lecture in several cities in Asia about the Holocaust Museum; the lecture was called “The Poetics of Polarity: An Architecture of Mourning and Celebration.” He taught at Pratt, and, rather than take architecture jobs that didn’t appeal to him, he became a substitute teacher at a high school in Manhattan. “The pay was terrible,” says Stephen Fink, the administrator who hired him. “It was a second-chance high school. Some of these kids had authority issues. Stephen wanted a school where you could make some sort of impact. He would talk to them about Japanese culture, or architecture. It was very unusual to have someone like him doing this. He did it for a couple of years, then he went to Hong Kong.”
On Valentine’s desk is a paperweight of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. An immense building with a sweeping winglike roof, it was intended to adorn the Hong Kong waterfront in the way that the Sydney Opera House adorns Sydney Harbor. Valentine had gone to Hong Kong to look for work—at the time, a lot of American architects were working there—and was walking through the old Hong Kong Convention Centre when he saw a display of plans for an extensive addition. He got a job working on the final designs, which he expected would take no more than six months. On the plans, though, he noticed that the roof and the structure were not precisely aligned. “I had spent so much time developing the geometry of the Holocaust Museum that I could see the problem at the Hong Kong Centre,” he says.
He stayed for two and a half years, until the building was done. As a farewell, he stood on the roof and hit golf balls into Hong Kong Harbor.
Science fiction is the schizophrenic cousin of literature. Similarly, cryonics is the half-mad relative of cryobiology—the study of life at any temperature below normal. One aim of cryobiology is to find a means of freezing organs for transplant so that they can be stored until they are needed. When living tissue is frozen, ice crystals form and tear the cells in the tissue apart. The breakthrough that Saul Kent had been waiting for is the refinement of a process called vitrification. Vitrification involves replacing as much of the water in a body as possible with chemicals that solidify without forming ice. As tissue is being cooled, nascent ice crystals form—structures that will become ice at a lower temperature. An organ injected with cryonic chemicals can be cooled so rapidly that the nascent crystals never become ice. As the body approaches absolute zero, the tissue is preserved in a state that is something like glass. “A liquid from which time has been subtracted” is how Greg Fahy, a cryobiologist who began experimenting with vitrification about twenty years ago, describes it. He calls vitrification “an incomplete breakthrough.” The obstacle is that a dose of chemicals sufficient to replace all the water in a body or an organ is toxic. If there are not enough chemicals, the nascent crystals form actual crystals during thawing because, while it’s not difficult to cool tissue rapidly, it is difficult to warm it rapidly. The bigger the mass, the longer it takes—a body takes more time than a kidney—and the more time spent within the range of temperatures at which the crystals form, the greater the harm.
There is a facility in Michigan where a person can be frozen, and there are two in Northern California. The Alcor Life Extension Foundation has moved to a warehouse near the airport in Scottsdale, Arizona; Saul Kent is still a board member. The people who have put money down with Alcor occasionally describe themselves as Alcorians. Alcorians believe that the re-animation of a person’s body will be accomplished by computers and machines the size of cells and maybe smaller. Fleets of these devices will patrol the bloodstream and repair cells and kill diseases. They may even take over the circulation of blood and replace the heart. Such thinking involves a field known as nanotechnology, a term popularized by K. Eric Drexler in 1986, when he was a researcher at M.I.T. Alcorians think that a future of this kind is inevitable. By having their bodies frozen, they believe they are making sensible preparations. The alternative, they say, is to be dead forever. The cost of maintaining their bodies is covered by life-insurance policies. Alcor also has accounting practices to help assure that what money someone has when he dies will be waiting for him when he wakes up. The suggestion that the world might run out of room, if everyone is to be preserved, is met by Alcorians with the response that by the time the science to bring dead people back to life is in hand a lot of us will be living in space anyway.
Valentine retrieved the Timeship from storage in the fall of 2000. He began to concentrate on the Timeship’s reliability. He wanted to avoid new technologies, because he thought they were more likely to fail. Valentine says he told the security consultants he interviewed, “ ‘I’m an architect designing a secure building for the sixteenth century. What would you do?’ ‘We’d use an iris scan, remote cameras,’ they’d say. ‘No, you aren’t listening,’ I’d say. ‘I’m designing a building for the sixteenth century that has to be secure. What would you do?’ ‘Well, we’d use computers.’ And I’d say, ‘Electricity hasn’t been invented yet,’ and about that time you could see them start to get it.” He told the engineers he used—Vincent DeSimone, who was an engineer for the World Trade Center, and Valentine Lehr, the engineer for the Taipei Financial Center—“Imagine you’re in the Roman Forum, chiselling your name into a block of ice. As long as you can read it, you will know who you are. Preserve it for a hundred years.”
The Timeship has a single entrance, which is beyond the series of rings and connects to the building through a tunnel. The rings prevent someone from driving up to the Timeship in a truck or a car with a bomb in it. Valentine has considered opening and closing huge doors by means of water pumped into reservoirs and released, and perhaps surrounding the building with a golf course, so that all day long there will be people around it. Most buildings that are two hundred years old have had a fire. The neighborhoods of the Timeship will be cooled by means of liquid nitrogen. Water in the presence of liquid nitrogen turns to ice, which can cause a lot of damage. If there is a fire in the conventional areas of the Timeship, it will be put out with water. Between the conventional areas and the client storage, powders and chemicals will be used. Should the fire spread to the storage area, liquid nitrogen will be released. The nitrogen will cool the flames before they do much damage, then smother them, since they cannot burn in the absence of oxygen.
Valentine figures that he needs between three hundred and a thousand acres for the Timeship (six hundred and forty acres is a square mile). He hopes to buy the land this year for a few million dollars and to break ground in 2005.
Each time Valentine visits a site, he makes a video of it and takes photographs, and he visits the town it is closest to and walks around the schools and drives through neighborhoods where scientists and researchers who will work for the Timeship might live. The land that Valentine sees is usually part of a big ranch, or else it belongs to a company that has gone out of business. For the best-looking land, Valentine sometimes competes with developers who plan to lay down a golf course and put up some high-end homes and are willing to pay a lot more money than he is. Also, they tend not to consult seismic engineers before making an offer and so move faster. The cheap land usually comes with an eyesore town that has bad schools or is too rugged and desolate and has rattlesnakes and lizards running across it and stands of cactus that will shoot needles into you like a porcupine if you brush up against them. The representatives of one state told Valentine that if he bought the land they were showing him he could rename the town and have his own Zip Code.
Valentine has in mind two landscapes. One would be on high ground, making the Timeship visible for miles. The other would be on low ground, with a rim around it. “A crater with a ring of hills, and you’d own the crater and the hills,” he says.
Valentine makes a trip about every two weeks to examine sites, and not long ago I made one with him. We went to the desert and stayed for two days. Valentine had made a similar trip a few weeks earlier and had seen sites from a helicopter, and from those he had chosen the ones he wanted to see from the ground. We were met at our hotel by a young woman who works for the state agency that courts biotech companies and a man who works for one of the state’s power companies; the difficulty of supplying a remote site with power is one of Valentine’s more pressing concerns. They drove us in a four-wheel-drive truck to a town in the high desert, where we picked up a woman who worked for the local government. Then we drove to a site that had some rock formations that looked like sleeping figures. There was also a lake. Valentine had seen it from the air and thought the Timeship might fit handsomely beside it. The land belonged to a ranch. The part of it that Valentine wanted to see was behind a locked gate, so we climbed over a barbed-wire fence and crossed some low hills, stepping over cow pies and looking out for snakes. The guy from the power company mentioned that, a few years ago, an article in a magazine had described the town as a terrific place to live. “Didn’t that bring a lot of people from California here?” he asked the woman from the local government.
“That, and they had an earthquake, too,” she said.
“What’s the earthquake situation here?” Valentine asked.
“We don’t have any,” the woman said.
The two of them walked ahead. “I’m not so sure it’s a safe place in terms of earthquakes,” Valentine said. “I have different data that she doesn’t know. It’s not the worst area, but it’s not the safest, either.”
He put a video camera to his eye and, sweeping it across the landscape, said, “This is the rock-formation site. It’s absolutely beautiful. You may not have to build by the lake after all.” Then he lowered the camera and said, “Look at this. Can you imagine coming to the Timeship across this land? I want this site. This is where we’re going. This is it.” Then he sighed. “That’s what I say today,” he said.
We went back to the car. The power-company guy had called the real-estate agent handling the property. “The Realtor says this place is maybe in escrow already,” he said. Valentine nodded. “Seventeen grand an acre. That’s dirt cheap around here. You sure you don’t want to locate here and just look at those rocks?”
“That’s what I think,” Valentine said. “But you’re telling me it’s sold already. You sure that’s not just a pressure tactic?”
“It might be,” the guy said. “Not necessarily sold—he isn’t sure. He’s calling back.”
We drove into town to drop off the woman from the government and to look at some maps. On the way, the man from the power company got a phone call, and to Valentine he mouthed the words, “It’s the agent,” which made him look like he was struggling for breath. Valentine said, “Is there a letter of intent?”
“On the property there is. You want to talk to him?”
Valentine shook his head. “The letter of intent,” he said. “How intentional is it?” But by this time the real-estate agent had hung up.
We had lunch at a steak house on a mesa off the highway with a slow-talking, cowboy-looking real-estate agent and his wife. They took us to a ranch in a valley, a rim site. The rancher didn’t intend to sell, but the agent had heard about Valentine’s search and had persuaded him to let Valentine look at the land, in case the offer he made was attractive—in other words, in case some fool from New York City offered so much money that the rancher could close up shop in the chaparral and move to Belize. The ranch was in a valley at the end of a long, winding dirt road that went over low, brushy hills. Between the ranch gate and a trailer near a grove of cottonwoods and a muddy water hole were pens of muddy deer, some of them lying down, some of them with big antlers, and all of them looking at us with shiny black eyes. The ranch’s foreman was a small, portly man, dressed in a denim shirt, jeans, and a straw cowboy hat. He said that he had four hundred and thirty head of deer, which he sold for venison, and eighty-two or eighty-five buffalo. “I got three-quarter and one-half buffalo,” he said, meaning buffalo that had been cross-bred with cattle. The woman from the biotech agency said, “What’s the difference?,” and the foreman shrugged and said, “I just like to see how they grow.” He climbed onto a four-wheel all-terrain motorbike and led us up a steep hill on a switchback road to the highest point of the land so that Valentine could see the views. He gave the ranch foreman his camera and lined up the four of us for a picture. “What are you going to use for a background?” the foreman said. “Ain’t no background up here.” He took the picture of us posed against the sky. Then he said that ranching out there would absolutely kill a man who didn’t know what he was doing. Cold, for one thing, he said.
On the trip back into town, Valentine pretended to be very interested when the subject of another biotech company, a British firm that manufactured a diagnostic kit, and which had just bought land nearby, came up. He wanted the others to think that he regarded the company as competition.
The next morning, early, we rented a convertible and met up by a car dealership on the highway with a different biotech rep from the state and one from a mine that had gone out of business. The mine’s owner was hoping to sell his land to a company that might hire some of the people the mine had put out of work. The land was very cheap. As we drove, hawks wheeled above us. When they intersected with the sun, their wings turned pale, as if they were made out of tissue paper. We passed a car with tinted windows and a license plate that said “himself.” We left our car outside the old mine and drove deep into the country in the biotech rep’s four-wheel drive. From the top of the highest hill, we could see the mine and the valley and a river running through it and piles of scrap-metal girders that looked like wires. The wash from the mine pits was like a layer of dirty snow on top of red dirt; iron, the mine guy said. He pointed to a small airport in the valley and said, “That was Airport of the Year a few years ago. Used to be an old dirt runway, and the city partnered up with the government, and it’s a very nice runway now. You can bring your smaller jets in, corporate ones.” Valentine nodded opaquely, as if to say maybe he had a jet, maybe he didn’t. He unrolled a map and asked the mine guy to hold it so that he could take a video of our position. In the wind, the corners of the map fluttered like pennants.
The biotech rep said, “So, are you looking to relocate, combine, or start a new business?”
Valentine said, “Combination.”
“Relocating, new?”
“Combining,” Valentine said.
“Hell, it don’t matter,” the man said, and spat on the ground.
“You got employees?” the mine rep asked.
“Let me put it this way,” Valentine said. “We’re looking to find a site, and when we do we’ll be staying for a very long time. Fifty years, a hundred years, at least.”
The men raised their eyebrows and nodded.
Valentine began taking photographs of the four compass points. “We’ll be looking to hire from the area,” he said. “And we’ll also be bringing people in.”
Scratching the back of his neck, the mine guy said, “Well, you’ll be the favorite sons, I guess.” He turned toward the other man, and they nodded at each other.
“Long as you don’t glow at night,” the other man said, scuffing the dirt with his boot.
Valentine finished taking photographs, then the man from the biotech agency drove us to our car, and we headed back to our hotel.
It is rare for an architect to have as much control over a building as Valentine has over the Timeship. It is also rare for an architect to design a building of the Timeship’s proportions that isn’t a hotel or an office building or an apartment house, and to do it all himself.
I asked Valentine what appeals to him about the Timeship. “There are so many complications,” he said. “The whole science level—how do you make this work? Have a column whose top is at room temperature and whose base is at absolute zero? The life-support systems, the security systems, the difficulty of making all of that part of a building that is inspirational. There are so many levels, really: spiritual, philosophical, ethical, love, life, and death. If you’re doing a hotel or an office building or a casa bella in the Hamptons, what do you get excited about? The façade? The entrance? The lobby? It’s decoration.”
I asked how he would feel if the Timeship never got built. He took a long time to answer. “Sometimes ideas, if they’re not built, have the consolation prize that they’ve stirred people’s imaginations,” he said finally. “They aren’t necessarily lost. People will think of them again.” ♦
