by Tim Neilson
“I’ll take your word for it,” Anna responded. “I don’t know much about British political history.”
“Anyway,” Cam continued, “this is the important bit here.”
James and Anna leaned forward to read.
Crick has been getting nowhere with his ideas about heavy isotope-based medical treatments. He consulted Burnet, the Australian biologist, who told him that the only way forwards would be through the world turning out to be like something in the works of Isaac Asimov. Crick has concluded that he’s right.
It’s not surprising, Anna thought to herself, that Burnet was dismissive of the idea. It would have sounded extraordinarily farfetched back then, before physics had ventured deeply into the bizarre phenomena occurring inside atoms. And besides, Burnet was more interested in the biological part of biochemistry than the chemical part, let alone something dependent primarily on subatomic physics.
“I don’t know much about Burnet,” James pondered, “but from what I’ve read he doesn’t strike me as someone who would have had much interest in science fiction.”
“He wouldn’t need to be a big fan just to choose the name ‘Asimov’ to kill Crick’s idea,” Anna pointed out. “Asimov was world famous by then.”
“Crick’s family,” Cam went on, “and Burnet’s, were very generous in trying to help, but they couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. Same with their few colleagues from that era who are still around. If I’m going to find anything useful, it will have to be in the documentary records. So …” he went on, “we’re looking for things Crick was working on some time up to mid, or perhaps late, 1959, but no later, which relate to the use of different isotopes for medical purposes. Hopefully there’ll be something that spells out his thinking on subatomic particles making antibodies work better by moving through time. And now,” he said, looking at James, “I suppose I’d better let you know the clues you are looking for – the sorts of things that will tell you what you’re looking at is important, even if the word ‘isotope’ or ‘immunology’ doesn’t appear.”
“You’ll have to tell me, too,” said Anna. “Remember I’m in earth sciences – we don’t really share a common language with medicine.”
“Are you going to be looking too?” James asked Claudia.
“Apparently not,” Claudia responded, glancing sideways at Cam with considerable coldness. “He’s scared that I’d be identified as his next-door neighbour in college, and …”
“I see,” James intervened hastily, not wanting to reopen what seemed to have been a sharp disagreement.
Cam, likewise. Moving the discussion on, he turned to Tina. “What about you?”
“This kind of thing isn’t Tina’s forte,” Anna cut in. “She’s riding shotgun.”
“OK,” Cam said. “Well, it’s probably a very limited period we need to look at. Work on the immune system has been going on for a long time, but it was only in the mid-1950s that immunologists started to develop really good theories about how molecular interactions between antibodies and antigens work. In fact, Burnet first published his clonal selection theory in 1957.”
Very quickly, Tina’s attention started to drift. She knew in a general sense what the body’s immune system was, and that ‘immunology’ was a scientific discipline concerned with the immune system. But not long after Cam started talking about something sounding like the ‘colonial selection theory’ she rapidly lost track of the conversation. She considered asking to be excused and heading out into the fresh air and sunshine but decided against it. She thought that she’d detected a note of irony in Anna’s last comment, and was afraid Anna still regarded her presence on the trip as an unnecessary encumbrance. If that were her older sister’s opinion, Tina didn’t want to reinforce it. There had been many occasions when Anna had taken a dim view of what she saw as Tina’s lack of application to important but mundane tasks. Even though Anna wouldn’t expect Tina to understand what Cam was saying, she would think it was Tina’s duty as a self-appointed member of the party to pay attention and take in whatever she could. She resigned herself to sitting through an unintelligible explanation of biomedical jargon.
It wasn’t long before she concluded that trying to follow Cam was a waste of time. However, she was still reluctant to opt out of the gathering. Surreptitiously, she edged her chair back, manoeuvring herself into a position on the edge of the group, away from Anna’s field of vision, and where she was less likely to be noticed by the other four who were all intently engaged in discussion. After a few moments just to make sure the others were completely engrossed, she fished her iPhone out, slipped in her earpieces and switched on some music.
She kept her eyes intently on the group, so that if they looked like emerging from their discussion she could whip the earpieces out and feign attentiveness. She was easily able to multitask desultory listening with vigilant watching, something she was well used to doing. Tina may not have been able to comprehend the science, but her upbringing in the market-garden suburbs west of Melbourne, where organised crime was a conventional feature of neighbourhood life, had instilled in her a capacity for sustained alertness without conscious effort. As she watched, her thoughts meandered.
She didn’t resent not being involved in the discussion. Quietly sitting and watching while James, Anna and Daniel were talking was normal for her. She didn’t expect them to censor themselves just because she was with them. They weren’t consciously excluding her from the conversation, and indeed she never felt the need to intrude. She was perfectly happy to bask in the warm inclusive ambience of James’s and Daniel’s friendly acceptance of her membership of the group, and Anna’s assumption that her friends were Tina’s friends.
After a while she decided to check whether the technicalities were finished with and if something more interesting was being discussed.
“Well,” said Cam slowly, apparently in response to a question from James, “you don’t need to know much about that for what you’re doing, but it can’t hurt for you to have the big picture. Some painkilling agents operate on nerve endings, but many of them operate at the other end of the nervous system, in the brain.”
Not promising, thought Tina.
“The latter type operate by means of chemicals that affect the ‘receptor’ cells in the brain, specifically those types of receptors that generate feelings of pain, or, conversely, generate feelings of wellbeing. Some of that type of chemical stimulate the body’s own production or release of the ‘neurotransmitters’, triggering the operation of the receptors. Other types contain the neurotransmitter. The exact way that any particular neurotransmitter interacts with the relevant receptors isn’t well understood. There’s still a debate about whether the receptor itself alters its own chemical structure to accommodate the neurotransmitter – what they call the ‘induced-fit theory’ – or not. What I’m working on is a converse of the induced-fit theory. But whether or not the receptors adapt their chemical structure to the neurotransmitters, what if we could make neurotransmitters that adapt themselves to receptors?”
Tina tuned back out, reinserting her earpieces.
It was a pity, she thought, that Daniel wasn’t with them, though she understood why it was better from a security perspective that he wasn’t. She perused the four conspirators, still engrossed in planning their mission. She had met Cam briefly on one of his visits to Australia, and sensed that he was someone like James and Daniel with whom she could have a rapport despite their very different minds. Claudia seemed nice, too …
Subconsciously she noticed a change in the demeanours of the others. Automatically, she switched off her music and pulled out her earpieces.
“Our rooms ought to be ready now,” James observed.
“Thanks guys, and good luck,” Cam said, rising to leave.
“See you in about an hour,” Claudia said smilingly to James, and the two of them moved slightly apart, evidently exchanging phone numbers.
“Why are we meeting up with Claudia?” Tin
a asked Anna, as the others began drifting down the stairs towards the reception area.
“Not ‘we’, just James,” Anna responded, in a tone that suggested that Tina ought to have guessed that fact.
“What for? Why just James?” Tina asked, a hint of hostile suspicion in her voice.
“She and James are going to take a walk around town looking at the sights,” Anna explained with exaggerated patience.
“Why?” demanded Tina, surprising herself with the imperative tone of her interrogation.
“Why? Why do you think?” asked Anna in exasperation. Then she noticed the earpieces dangling out of Tina’s pocket.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she snapped with genuine irritation. “Never mind about James and Claudia, let’s go and check in.”
She marched off without giving Tina a chance to pursue her enquiries. Tina followed, in a mood of considerably less equanimity than she had been in only minutes earlier.
Chapter 8
Being Sensible
The sun had not yet risen, and thick black clouds were blocking any light that might have been refracted from behind the horizon. Daniel decided to grab another quarter of an hour’s sleep, but once awake he found his mind working relentlessly. He soon gave up and started to prepare for the day. As he showered, the most frustrating of the limitations he was facing in his research reconfigured in his thoughts.
If, he pondered, you know the height and width of an object, then assuming that you don’t know anything else about it, you won’t be able to estimate how thick it is. In the same way, knowing all three dimensions of an object doesn’t give you any clue as to its measurements in the fourth or fifth dimensions. And they aren’t observable by normal means.
But if you knew an object’s height and width and you also knew what that object was made of and how much it weighed, you’d be able to make a fair order of magnitude guess at how thick it was. So, in order to make estimates of measurement in the fourth dimension, you need to be able to identify some characteristic that varies with that dimension, but doesn’t vary with any of the normal three. Weight won’t do, because it varies with the normal three. So does pretty much everything else we can monitor.
He knew that if the conditions were right energy could transfer through the unseen dimensions. Or at least he believed so, since that was the most straightforward explanation of certain phenomena he’d observed. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to recreate those phenomena, and he wasn’t aware of it ever having been done in a controllable way. And even if he could cause them to occur, it would be unscientific, not to mention dangerous, to make it happen without a good theoretical basis for predicting what would eventuate.
He sighed. The hard slog of higher mathematical reasoning would have to continue until he was confident he had a coherent theory worth testing. He’d have to hope that when he had created the theory, the theory itself would give him the clues as to how to proceed to prediction and experiment.
He had some idea of the general principles he believed would govern energy transfer through at least the fourth dimension. He and Anna had shaped those ideas into a short, purely mathematical paper, which had been published in a respectable journal and had received mild approval from the few scholars who had noticed it. Making a further advance was proving difficult, though. He suspected that progress could not be made by abstract logic alone, and sensed he needed some intuitive or imaginative breakthrough before he would be able take the next step.
Emerging from his reverie, he found himself shaved and dressed, ready to head to the physics building to the south, on the main Melbourne University campus. But he also found that he was very hungry. Noting the time, he realised that the College’s dining hall would be open. He decided to go in and have a proper meal. That might save some time in the middle of the day.
His mind reverted to some loose ends in the mathematical analysis of the work he and Anna had already done. He didn’t expect to get the necessary flash of insight by going over old ground, but there would be no harm, he reflected, in meditating some more on the problem.
Radiation of energy, he mused, from a three-dimensional body varies to the power of four …
He stepped down a shallow flight of stone steps onto the tiled floor of the vestibule. A small fire crackled in the stone wall to his left. One of the pair of great timber doors ahead was open, revealing a few scattered early risers seated at long wooden tables beneath the lofty vaulted ceiling. To the right of the doors was a memorial plaque listing the names of those former Ormond College men who had died in World War I. It was formidably long. Judged in the light of the tiny college that had existed in the early twentieth century, it was chilling.
Daniel fleetingly wondered what intellectual preoccupations had engaged the minds of those long-dead former students when they had walked across the floor he was now traversing. What ambitions had they reluctantly put aside in order to enlist, presumably knowing that they might never return to fulfil their dreams? And what would they think of someone who had waved off his friends on an overseas journey to help a friend who had been subjected to what amounted to terrorism, and, having seen them leave, turned back to pursue the advancement of his own career?
He stopped. That’s all a load of nonsense, he told himself angrily. His work on multi-dimensional energy transfer was enormously important. Finding a way of tapping energy from way beyond the apparent constraints of three-dimensional space could be of huge benefit to all humanity, perhaps as much so as any technological advance in human history. Meanwhile, the others knew that they were unlikely to find anything. And even if they did find something that helped Cam, all Cam was trying to do was make an incremental improvement to pain-relieving drugs that already worked very well anyway.
James and the others are really just going on a glorified holiday, he insisted to himself, while he was behaving like an adult and doing a real job. He strode into the servery in a mood of resentful self-justification and heaped a plate full of food with grim determination.
Chapter 9
Problems at Home
They forced themselves to stay awake as long as possible; settling into the routines of the time zone to which they’d travelled was the best way to overcome jet lag. But with the best of intentions, after reconvening at the hotel, Anna, Tina and James gave in, had a very early dinner, and retired to their respective rooms. With the evening sun of the far northern summer still high in the sky and gleaming outside their closed curtains, they collapsed into an exhausted unconsciousness.
When James woke it was still twilight. Restless and unable to get back to sleep, he lay tossing and turning for a few hours, checking the time and mentally comparing it with the time back in Melbourne. He drifted in and out of something a bit like sleep but not quite into the full unconsciousness of true slumber, his mind working overtime, but with no clarity. He was dimly aware of feeling anxious about what he would be doing, but in his semi-comatose state he couldn’t identify any grounds for his uneasiness. From time to time he returned to full wakefulness, reminding himself that he’d often had similar experiences before a normal day’s work, and he couldn’t recall any occasion when his fretting had been justified. And so the transition to daylight progressed – he would do his best to relax, eventually he would start to doze, and the cycle would begin again.
Eventually, James flung back the curtains, flinching and blinking at the brilliant early morning light. Noticing one or two joggers and dog walkers outside he decided that it was not too insanely early, by local standards, to start the day.
He didn’t rush – instead lingering over the process of showering, dressing, and finally strolling to the dining room for breakfast. There was no point in hurrying anything until Anna and Tina were also ready to face the world. Eventually they wandered in, greeting James in a rather perfunctory manner. Anna appeared dark-eyed and slightly disorientated, evidently having made an even poorer transition across the time zones than James had. By her manner it seemed tha
t the local coffee was not entirely to her taste, but she still consumed a good deal of it and regained some of her normal alertness. James guessed, though, that it would be another day or so before she was fully acclimatised. Tina, James noticed, was unusually subdued, and food and stimulants didn’t snap her out of it the way they had for Anna.
It’s her first big trip, thought James. Maybe it’s tougher for her than for someone who’s travelled long distances before.
“We should probably split up the work,” Anna suggested suddenly, recalling James from his reverie. “Cam has arranged for both of us to have access to everywhere we need to check, so let’s divide up the list and see how we go.”
James wondered how Cam had gone about making those arrangements. He presumed that Cam hadn’t done it by phone or email, given his concerns about being watched. But even if he did it by discreet personal visits, James thought, if he really was being observed, what would the observers make of him visiting places that had nothing to do with his work or with his normal recreational activities?
There’s no point in worrying about that, James told himself severely. Let’s just stick to getting the job done.
“What if one of us finishes quicker than the other?” he asked Anna.
“I don’t know how much we’ll find at any of these places,” Anna admitted, gesturing towards Cam’s list, “but look how many there are. I can’t see either of us finishing this morning no matter how little there is to look at. Let’s meet somewhere for lunch and we can decide then if we need to change the way we’re doing it. Say about one o’clock?”
“OK, let’s meet at The Eagle,” James suggested. “You really must see it while you’re here, and today’s as good a day as any. Do you have a map? I always find a paper map easier than trying to locate things on a phone.”
Of course you do, Anna thought to herself, knowing James’s tendency to struggle with any technology more advanced than a ballpoint pen, but she was too polite to say so. She confirmed that she did have a map, then turned with an air of affectionate tolerance to Tina.