The Sandpit

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Marvar’s mood had shifted, his tempo had quickened. Once he began, he did not stop. Every sentence he spoke made him need to speak another. Before, he had sounded furred, tense, but now, with no one to overhear him save for Dyer, he spoke clearly, coherently, as if in a confessional.

  Marvar unlatched the gate into Port Meadow and for the next ninety minutes gave an impassioned account of his recent research at the Clarendon. The large meadow stretched flat to the river, unploughed for millennia, a grazing pampa for cattle and horses. From across it, they would have seemed like two academics deep in talk, one of them engrossing the other in his subject – the history of our future energy.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘IF YOU HEAT SOMETHING REALLY HOT,’ said Marvar as they walked towards the weir, ‘it goes ballistic. It’s like shutting a kid with tantrums in a cage – like shutting Vasily in a cage.’ Dyer had to think of Vasily as a plasma. ‘When you heat plasma, it doesn’t like it. It goes whistling around, creating instabilities, and takes on a mean-minded identity of its own.’

  Until now, there had been no breakthrough in heating plasma to a ‘self-sustained burn’ – that is to say, to the point where the plasma generated more heat than was put into it, although there had been many experiments using exotic metals, super-conducting magnets, giant lasers and so forth.

  Always, the instabilities got in the way.

  In the south of France, the world’s most advanced nations had chosen to build a big expensive reactor costing $25 billion. But this wouldn’t be tested for another eight years. Even then, ITER could very well fail like the Zeppelin, or like the fission breeder reactor in America, fifteen years in the making, and closed down before it had conducted a single experiment.

  Other than in a hydrogen bomb, which needed to be triggered by a fissile atomic explosion, the most successful attempt to replicate fusion peacefully on earth had been at the Culham laboratory outside Oxford: here, in 1997, in a gigantic machine the size of the Pompidou Centre, fusion had been achieved – if for less than a second. The trick was to keep fusion going for much longer, and on a vastly smaller scale, but this had eluded the world’s scientific community. Cold fusion, tokamaks, stellarators, magnetic confinement – each had held up a flickering promise. Not one device had proved to work. A self-sustained burn continued to stay out of reach, a chimera.

  ‘That is, until 7.32 p.m. last Friday.’

  But Marvar was rushing ahead of himself. None of this would make sense unless Dyer understood the nature of his research.

  ‘Pauli? You have heard of him?’

  Dyer admitted that he hadn’t.

  ‘Pauli was a pioneer of quantum physics,’ Marvar went on, with an erudite smile. ‘He was watching a revue at a theatre in Copenhagen when the exclusion principle came to him.’

  Marvar had his brainwave after going to see Samir play at Summer Fields.

  ‘Do you know what gave me the idea?’ Marvar said, gathering momentum. ‘The football!’

  In order to make the ‘burn’, you needed to squash atoms into incredibly high densities. ‘The problem is, it’s like wrapping your fingers around a party balloon and then trying to squeeze. The balloon squishes out between your fingers and you can’t do it.’ The only way of attaining fusion was to create an absolutely symmetrical profile. ‘We have never achieved coherence all the way round, that is to say a perfect spherical wavefront – like a wave arriving along the beach at the same time.’ At Livermore, where billions of dollars had been spent on this, an array of long multiple lasers each one the size of two football pitches were beamed onto a target pellet so minuscule that you almost couldn’t see it, and every single time there had been spots.

  ‘Spots means squishing. It means it is not symmetrical.’

  Marvar was watching Samir in the act of taking a corner kick when his mind made an acrobatic skip: what if you could find a way of producing an utterly symmetrical implosion from a spherical laser?

  It blasted him in the face. The match was still going on when he hurried from the pitch and tore back to the Clarendon.

  Over the next days, he didn’t stop making calculations, on paper napkins, the backs of menus, yellow post-it notes (‘now I know what they’re called’) – ‘in sandpits even!’

  What he had realised: size didn’t matter. The machine didn’t need an elaborate magnetic cage, it didn’t need to be enormous, it didn’t have to be like Wembley. ‘It could be no bigger than a football.’

  The audacity of it. His idea went against the received wisdom of every internationally known scientist. But he couldn’t breathe a word to Samir, whose kick had inspired it. He couldn’t log on to his computer, it was likely to be monitored, and so he entered his calculations into a notebook that he kept in his coat. It was vital that nobody suspected what he was working on. Marvar’s team believed him still to be plugging away at plasma focus, and so he continued to conduct experiments with a tungsten-tipped electrode, making careful records, but these experiments were a decoy. He devoted the rest of his time to creating his ‘football’.

  ‘For three weeks, I hardly left the lab. The materials were all there, I didn’t need much.’

  He slaved through the night; there was less risk of being interrupted or observed. He tested a number of lasing mediums before fixing on the one which worked: ‘It was silly of me not to have thought of it sooner, a nonlinear optical crystal that I’d experimented with in Tehran.’

  Marvar had constructed a blanket out of this to wrap around the hot plasma, using the blanket as a laser. ‘I’m making it sound simple. It wasn’t simple.’ The uniform thickness of the blanket was critical. ‘To achieve the smooth wavefront, I had to mix in other lasing materials as well.’

  ‘Go slow, please,’ said Dyer. ‘What other materials?’

  Marvar reeled them off. (On struggling next morning to remember the details of their conversation, Dyer had a burn of regret that he hadn’t reached into Marvar’s pocket and borrowed his notebook. In his hangover, he was unable to recall if Marvar had said neodymium or monazite or bastnasite, or any of the candidates that Dyer googled. What he did grasp: Marvar had found a way of doping sand from rare earths to make crystals which, when added to the principal lasing medium, smoothed out all instabilities and dramatically increased the neutron production.)

  Then, last Friday evening, behind a shiny red door in the Clarendon, after everyone had left for the Magdalen Arms to toast Professor Whitton’s Fellowship to the Australian Academy of Science, Marvar took a pellet of frozen deuterium contained in a thin shell of plastic, and placed it inside his laser. The icy outer surface of this central pellet was one spherical mirror; the outer edge of the blanket was the other mirror, forming the laser cavity.

  ‘Not crazy, it just required exquisite alignment between the two.’

  ‘How did you support the pellet – if it needed to be dead in the centre?’

  ‘Excellent question!’

  Whitton and Cubbage in their experiments used a tube five microns in diameter – ‘but that still causes very noticeable perturbations to the symmetry.’ Marvar’s solution: magnetic levitation.

  He looked up. Dyer was flailing again.

  ‘Let’s not go into that now. Let me tell you what happened.’

  Shortly after 7.30 p.m. Marvar stepped back from the target chamber behind a lead-lined concrete wall, slipped a pair of safety goggles over his eyes, and switched on the power supply. Through the bright green lenses, he watched multiple laser pulses launch shock waves into the pellet, sending waves that rocked back and forth, back and forth, getting stronger and stronger, like the waves that Samir used to slosh in his bath – ‘his mother hated it!’ – until all at once the lasing atoms broke through, ‘creating a pulse of beautiful, spherical light’.

  It was not a sustained reaction; it lasted until the fuel was burned up – this carefully calculated by Marvar in order for him to survive the high-density implosion. In a molten hurry before any of the team returned,
Marvar then measured the size of the reaction with the Clarendon’s time-gated X-ray camera, the burn duration with the X-ray streak camera, and the neutron yield with the lab’s new neutron activation detector. He scarcely dared breathe the result.

  He drew himself up and looked fully at Dyer.

  ‘I had not just good compression, it was better than that. I had perfect compression. When I checked the data, I had created more energy than I had used.’

  Marvar said, blazing: ‘I had got the conditions for fusion using a machine no bigger than Samir’s football on the space of your kitchen table.’

  Chapter Twelve

  MARVAR TURNED AWAY. IN HIS coat, he stood on the bank and stared at the trees. An excursion boat was roped to the far side, chairs stacked up on deck. A young woman’s muted laughter came from the bridge.

  Dyer opened his mouth and he forgot what he was going to say. It was incredible what Marvar had told him. If true, the implications were immense for everyone, for all time.

  But was it true?

  When they’d set out from Jericho less than two hours earlier, Dyer couldn’t help feeling that Marvar was treading the line between deception and self-deception. His scepticism had not dissolved as Marvar described his football-shaped laser. It was hard for Dyer to suspend disbelief about a junior researcher from Tehran – who must have been under surveillance already, given the history of the Iranian nuclear programme – being able to make such a significant discovery, on a Friday evening on his own, without leaving any trace.

  Dyer now made an about-turn.

  Unlikely as it seemed, here was this solitary Iranian in his late thirties, in exile in this city of striped ties and black gowns and rain, naive, passionate, who never expected to crack nuclear fusion, but who might have succeeded where teams of scientists and government-funded organisations had failed.

  It never ceased to amaze Dyer, the stuff we didn’t know, which it took the ingenuity or the sheer good luck of one individual to come along and clarify. Marvar’s fortuitous discovery – a new continent of knowledge entirely – was it so different from Cabral’s random discovery of Brazil after a storm at sea forced the admiral to turn westward?

  Just for one instant, Dyer wanted to relish the outrageous outside chance that Rustum Marvar was more than a fugitive physicist in a dun-coloured greatcoat. He was a symbol, exquisite and indelible, like a figure on the stamps that Dyer collected as a boy to commemorate the moment when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, or the Wright brothers took off from the ground, or Marconi heard an impossibly far-away voice in the crackle.

  A dense layer of cumulus lay overhead, an ice-floe of it. If you concentrated, you could see that it was moving. A fitful wind carried the smell of fresh cow pats and horse dung.

  Dyer was uncertain how long passed before he heard himself say, ‘What do you plan to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Marvar replied in a lifeless voice, speaking with his back to Dyer. There was something sad about him, like a man who had worked hard and still failed an exam. He took off his glasses and rubbed one eye and then another with the sleeve of his coat, and put his glasses back on. His movement had an excruciating slowness to it as he turned. ‘I really don’t know …’

  Dyer knew that he would remember Marvar’s expression for a long time, the hollowness in his brown eyes. If Dyer expected them to reflect what Marvar’s eyes alone had seen, he was shocked. There was no pulse of light in them. Where elation should have been was a nameless, infinite dread.

  ‘… You see, in my country, everything evil is having the time of its life.’

  The change was astonishing. A new person was speaking, in an indescribably sad voice, who didn’t need to remind Dyer how, in the cause of religion, the Ayatollahs had created a fascist state that rivalled the fascist states of 1930s Europe.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe the wickedness that is being done in the name of good – it’s big.’

  Iran was supposed to be a country dedicated to God. It was not. Religious diversity was despised, said Marvar, his voice tightening. ‘I’m not a religious person, but my mother – she was a believer, and how she suffered because of it. How she suffered!’

  Soon after his father’s death, when Marvar was seven, his mother had converted to Christianity. She experienced no repercussions at first. Then, five years ago, she was detained as she left the Janat-Abad church in Tehran, and her Christian books confiscated. Eventually released, she was reminded that apostasy was punishable by death. She died of pancreatic cancer eleven months later, still unable to worship freely.

  What Marvar believed in was science. He seemed not to have considered his position when he began his research, the implications of success: he had been pursuing his goal purely for science’s sake. Now he had to confront the political realities of his discovery.

  The intolerance shown to his mother had germinated an already rebellious seed. Marvar was a student at the University of Tehran when he came across Werner Heisenberg’s line that ‘effective resistance can only come from those who pretend to collaborate’. This impressed him, but less than the injunction of another atomic physicist, Fritz Houtermans: ‘Every decent man confronted by a totalitarian regime ought to have the pluck to commit high treason.’ In the liberating world of Oxford, exposed to scientists from every part of the globe, he had mustered the courage. He had resisted passing on his latest research to Tehran, despite the sharpening pressure on him from the Revolutionary Guard.

  ‘I have still not alerted them.’

  Inevitably, the Guards and their Mullah bosses would view his behaviour as treasonous, but Marvar had worked tirelessly to brush over his tracks. He had locked his notes in a safe in Oxford, while, to the Iranian Embassy in London every Saturday, he continued to send routine reports and theoretical studies – ‘bromides, essentially’. He copied these in to his team at the Clarendon. Until the arrival of Ralph Cubbage, Marvar had managed to keep his Australian professor in the dark. In Professor Whitton’s eyes, Marvar was a diligent if unsociable junior spectrometrist who dabbled not terribly successfully with magnetic levitation. It would never have crossed Whitton’s distracted mind that this plodding thirty-nine-year-old Iranian researcher had made imminent the feasibility of cheap fusion, any more than it would have entered the thinking of Marvar’s masters in Tehran when they permitted him to go to Oxford.

  But someone must have suspected. The idea that came to Marvar on the Summer Fields’ touchline excited him so much that it booted all else from his thoughts. When he made the obvious mistake of sending a happy text message to Shula, his fate was sealed.

  Word raced back to Tehran, either from the Embassy or else from another source, that Marvar was not being transparent, that he was hiding something. It was too soon to say what they knew, whether they had any inkling of what Marvar had done, but they must have suspected, given their reaction.

  Two figures featured prominently in Marvar’s nightmares. A General Damghani in the Revolutionary Guard who had lost his son in a gas attack against Saddam; and above him, an elderly Ayatollah from Qom, cultured, an expert in medieval poetry, who had been tortured by the Savak. This powerful duo were in charge of all Iranian physicists working abroad. They regarded America and Britain – after Israel – in the same light as had Saddam, and they lived by Saddam’s mantra: ‘He who arises to kill you, arise earlier and kill him first.’ Swift to suspect Marvar of betrayal, they called for an urgent new check on his background, and then made a decision. He must be brought into line – before the temptation seized him to share his research with another party.

  Marvar’s warning was delivered last Thursday morning to his pigeonhole at the Clarendon. He had inserted the memory stick in his laptop, and found himself listening to a sound recording, no words, merely muffled noises. Less than thirty seconds later, he yanked it out, ran from the room, down the corridor, into the toilet, and vomited.

  He said in a flat, used-up voice: ‘You must understand, it’s not hatred th
ey feel. It’s something deeper.’

  For the next twenty-four hours, he revolted against his imagination. What he had heard was not true, there was no proof, the recording was a set-up, these were actors, it was too soon for the authorities to have reacted.

  Then on Friday he received his cousin’s anguished message. A group of men had turned up early one morning at Marvar’s home off Hessabi Street where Shula was kept under house arrest, and taken her and Jamileh away.

  Marvar knew from friends what was likely. He read books, newspapers. It was impossible for him not to reconstruct the scene. To supply, unedited, the images and sounds of that day.

  The beating on all the doors, the footsteps on the roof.

  Chapter Thirteen

  SHULA WAS HOLDING JAMILEH WHEN they barged in. A group quite different from those in the parked car, whom Marvar had come to recognise over the summer. Men with beards and tight collars buttoned to the throat and wearing black baggy sirwal trousers a size too large. They would have shown Shula a photograph of herself and asked if it was her. Once she had confirmed that it was, they would have searched the house, even looking inside her slip-ons that he had bought in the Ducker’s closing-down sale. They would have discovered Shula’s radio tuned to the BBC Persian service. Tucked under the baby’s mattress they would have found the English novel that Marvar had purchased in haste from Blackwell’s before catching the bus to Heathrow. They would have blindfolded Shula, not allowing her to wear her shoes, and forced her outside to sit in the unmarked Paykan. They would have driven her, still clutching Jamileh, to the detention centre in Kahrizak and pushed her down a narrow corridor to a cell. Tiled floor, no windows, dark, the stench of faeces. Deaf to the baby’s screams, they would have grabbed Jamileh. Having covered her lustrous long black hair with a plain scarf, they would have slapped Shula, thrust her against the wall, stamped on her feet with their army boots, and then knotted her wrists and ankles to an iron bed. They would have hit the soles of her feet with a cable, all the while saying nothing, not asking questions. Before leaving, one of them would have tossed a blanket at her. Moments or hours later, Shula would have woken, feeling something move on her lips – until she realised that ants were crawling into her mouth and up into her nostrils. At some point, the men would have returned to untie her so that she could defecate in the corner. They would have gripped her by the shoulders, and half-carried her to another room, and only then would the blindfold have come off. As her eyes adjusted to the light, a black-bearded cleric in a black turban would have entered, sitting down at the bare wooden table between them. He would place a book on the table, and she would see that it was the English novel that Rustum had given her. She was an infidel, the turbaned man would begin. When he touched her, when he touched this filthy book, he became dirty, just as Jamileh became dirty when Shula fed her, and he would tell Shula that her milk was religiously prohibited because she was a non-believer, and she would not be allowed to bring up her daughter as a non-believer in an Islamic country, unless she cooperated. Then a guard, his face covered with a woollen mask showing only his mouth and eyes, would place a metal bowl on the table and Shula would see that it was filled with dried fruit. The cleric, after inspecting and selecting a date, would explain what other troubles she was in. She would be contaminated and tainted for ever unless she confessed and disclosed what her husband was hiding, which foreign agents he was seeing, what exactly he had revealed to them. The cleric would have listened, eating his date, and then another, while she insisted that she had no knowledge of her husband’s work in Oxford; Marvar never talked about it, she wouldn’t have understood even if he had, she was a student of literature, not a nuclear scientist. ‘Then what about this?’ the cleric would respond, and slide a note across the table that Shula would unfold with trembling fingers, on which were typed the words: Halfness, you changed the world for me – & again with our son & daughter. Now I may have done something! ‘What do you suppose he is talking about?’ And Shula would shake her head, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ and after a long pause the cleric would say, ‘What about his Christianity?’ Did her husband never talk about going to house churches and attending services that were against national security? Again, Shula would have shaken her head, this time more vehemently, and exclaimed in her most exasperated voice, ‘That was not Rustum, that was his mother!’ At this, the cleric would look at her, and it would need no words to say what he was thinking: Like mother, like child. Then he would give a nod for the masked guard to place on the table another bowl which was filled, so the cleric would explain before she retched, with her own filth. She had to cooperate or eat it. And she would have looked at him as if he really was insane, or she was. When she had stopped wiping her nose and was in a state to continue listening, he would say, ‘Do you want to see Jamileh again?’ Unless she ate it, she would never hold Jamileh in her arms. Her choice. He would have talked to her, chewing his dried-up fruit, while he wrote down her charges one by one on a sheet of paper, glancing up now and then to observe her progress, or making his way into a corner of the room to pray. Only after she had forced the last of the bowl’s contents into her mouth and swallowed it between sobs, gagging, blocking her mind, thinking only of Jamileh, would he read out what he had written. He would be charging her with the crime of national security and ‘collaborating with enemy states’, to be tried by Branch 13 of the Revolutionary Court; the crime of disrupting public opinion – indicating the novel – by spreading false information and immorality, to be tried by a special Court in Region 21 of Tehran; and – most serious – the crime of insulting the prophets and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, to be tried in Branch 16 of the Criminal Court. He would ask her to sign the piece of paper, and when – instead of picking up the pen and writing her name with the hysterical relief of nine out of every ten who sat there – she dragged her gaze up through his thick beard, over his plump lips, his pitted nose, into his eyes, thinking how much enmity comes out of two small pools which a thumbnail could extinguish, and said in a low searing voice that she would not commit this shitty perjury, even if that meant not seeing her daughter, because what good to a child on Allah’s earth was a mother who consented to lie in this sordid way, so that from now on whenever she looked into herself she would be afraid of seeing someone else, because she was innocent of these charges, as he well knew, he would meet her flaming gaze with no expression, and when she had finished speaking he would fold the sheet of paper and slip it into the novel, stand up, and before turning to leave, give another nod to the guard. After the cleric had closed the door behind him, the guard would tell her that she would be raped so that she could not go to heaven. He would take her to the prison library that was used for praying. They would rape her from behind and in front, both sides. Three men. In the library. All the time a hand, with dark hair on the knuckles, over her mouth. After half an hour, she would hardly be able to stand. She would be led back to her cell holding her stomach, walking in small steps, leaning forward. The guard would put her blindfold back on. He would retie her by the feet and hands to the bed. As an afterthought, he would cover her shoulders with the blanket. The last sounds that she would hear before she fell unconscious would be the grating of the guard’s heavy key and the hoarser cries of Jamileh along the corridor.