Robert didn’t care much either way; if anything, the less his alter ego had achieved, the less he’d be troubled by jealousy.
“Then what was it, that made you choose me?”
“You really haven’t guessed?” Helen took his free hand and held the fingers to her face; it was a tender gesture, but much more like a daughter’s than a lover’s. “It’s a warm night. No one’s skin should be this cold.”
Robert gazed into her dark eyes, as playful as any human’s, as serious, as proud. Given the chance, perhaps any decent person would have plucked him from Quint’s grasp. But only one kind would feel a special obligation, as if they were repaying an ancient debt.
He said, “You’re a machine.”
2
John Hamilton, Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, read the last letter in the morning’s pile of fan mail with a growing sense of satisfaction.
The letter was from a young American, a twelve-year-old girl in Boston. It opened in the usual way, declaring how much pleasure his books had given her, before going on to list her favourite scenes and characters. As ever, Jack was delighted that the stories had touched someone deeply enough to prompt them to respond this way. But it was the final paragraph that was by far the most gratifying:
However much other children might tease me, or grown-ups too when I’m older, I will NEVER, EVER stop believing in the Kingdom of Nescia. Sarah stopped believing, and she was locked out of the Kingdom forever. At first that made me cry, and I couldn’t sleep all night because I was afraid I might stop believing myself one day. But I understand now that it’s good to be afraid, because it will help me keep people from changing my mind. And if you’re not willing to believe in magic lands, of course you can’t enter them. There’s nothing even Belvedere himself can do to save you, then.
Jack refilled and lit his pipe, then reread the letter. This was his vindication: the proof that through his books he could touch a young mind, and plant the seed of faith in fertile ground. It made all the scorn of his jealous, stuck-up colleagues fade into insignificance. Children understood the power of stories, the reality of myth, the need to believe in something beyond the dismal grey farce of the material world.
It wasn’t a truth that could be revealed the “adult” way: through scholarship, or reason. Least of all through philosophy, as Elizabeth Anscombe had shown him on that awful night at the Socratic Club. A devout Christian herself, Anscombe had nonetheless taken all the arguments against materialism from his popular book, Signs and Wonders, and trampled them into the ground. It had been an unfair match from the start: Anscombe was a professional philosopher, steeped in the work of everyone from Aquinas to Wittgenstein; Jack knew the history of ideas in mediaeval Europe intimately, but he’d lost interest in modern philosophy once it had been invaded by fashionable positivists. And Signs and Wonders had never been intended as a scholarly work; it had been good enough to pass muster with a sympathetic lay readership, but trying to defend his admittedly rough-and-ready mixture of common sense and useful shortcuts to faith against Anscombe’s merciless analysis had made him feel like a country yokel stammering in front of a bishop.
Ten years later, he still burned with resentment at the humiliation she’d put him through, but he was grateful for the lesson she’d taught him. His earlier books, and his radio talks, had not been a complete waste of time — but the harpy’s triumph had shown him just how pitiful human reason was when it came to the great questions. He’d begun working on the stories of Nescia years before, but it was only when the dust had settled on his most painful defeat that he’d finally recognised his true calling.
He removed his pipe, stood, and turned to face Oxford. “Kiss my arse, Elizabeth!” he growled happily, waving the letter at her. This was a wonderful omen. It was going to be a very good day.
There was a knock at the door of his study.
“Come.”
It was his brother, William. Jack was puzzled — he hadn’t even realised Willie was in town — but he nodded a greeting and motioned at the couch opposite his desk.
Willie sat, his face flushed from the stairs, frowning. After a moment he said, “This chap Stoney.”
“Hmm?” Jack was only half listening as he sorted papers on his desk. He knew from long experience that Willie would take forever to get to the point.
“Did some kind of hush-hush work during the war, apparently.”
“Who did?”
“Robert Stoney. Mathematician. Used to be up at Manchester, but he’s a Fellow of Kings, and now he’s back in Cambridge. Did some kind of secret war work. Same thing as Malcolm Muggeridge, apparently. No one’s allowed to say what.”
Jack looked up, amused. He’d heard rumours about Muggeridge, but they all revolved around the business of analysing intercepted German radio messages. What conceivable use would a mathematician have been, for that? Sharpening pencils for the intelligence analysts, presumably.
“What about him, Willie?” Jack asked patiently.
Willie continued reluctantly, as if he was confessing to something mildly immoral. “I paid him a visit yesterday. Place called the Cavendish. Old army friend of mine has a brother who works there. Got the whole tour.”
“I know the Cavendish. What’s there to see?”
“He’s doing things, Jack. Impossible things.”
“Impossible?”
“Looking inside people. Putting it on a screen, like a television.”
Jack sighed. “Taking X-rays?”
Willie snapped back angrily, “I’m not a fool; I know what an X-ray looks like. This is different. You can see the blood flow. You can watch your heart beating. You can follow a sensation through the nerves from … fingertip to brain. He says, soon he’ll be able to watch a thought in motion.”
“Nonsense.” Jack scowled. “So he’s invented some gadget, some fancy kind of X-ray machine. What are you so agitated about?”
Willie shook his head gravely. “There’s more. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. He’s only been back in Cambridge a year, and already the place is overflowing with … wonders.” He used the word begrudgingly, as if he had no choice, but was afraid of conveying more approval than he intended.
Jack was beginning to feel a distinct sense of unease.
“What exactly is it you want me to do?” he asked.
Willie replied plainly, “Go and see for yourself. Go and see what he’s up to.”
The Cavendish Laboratory was a mid-Victorian building, designed to resemble something considerably older and grander. It housed the entire Department of Physics, complete with lecture theatres; the place was swarming with noisy undergraduates. Jack had had no trouble arranging a tour: he’d simply telephoned Stoney and expressed his curiosity, and no more substantial reason had been required.
Stoney had been allocated three adjoining rooms at the back of the building, and the “spin resonance imager” occupied most of the first. Jack obligingly placed his arm between the coils, then almost jerked it out in fright when the strange, transected view of his muscles and veins appeared on the picture tube. He wondered if it could be some kind of hoax, but he clenched his fist slowly and watched the image do the same, then made several unpredictable movements which it mimicked equally well.
“I can show you individual blood cells, if you like,” Stoney offered cheerfully.
Jack shook his head; his current, unmagnified flaying was quite enough to take in.
Stoney hesitated, then added awkwardly, “You might want to talk to your doctor at some point. It’s just that, your bone density’s rather —” He pointed to a chart on the screen beside the image. “Well, it’s quite a bit below the normal range.”
Jack withdrew his arm. He’d already been diagnosed with osteoporosis, and he’d welcomed the news: it meant that he’d taken a small part of Joyce’s illness — the weakness in her bones — into his own body. God was allowing him to suffer a little in her stead.
&nbs
p; If Joyce were to step between these coils, what might that reveal? But there’d be nothing to add to her diagnosis. Besides, if he kept up his prayers, and kept up both their spirits, in time her remission would blossom from an uncertain reprieve into a fully-fledged cure.
He said, “How does this work?”
“In a strong magnetic field, some of the atomic nuclei and electrons in your body are free to align themselves in various ways with the field.” Stoney must have seen Jack’s eyes beginning to glaze over; he quickly changed tack. “Think of it as being like setting a whole lot of spinning tops whirling, as vigorously as possible, then listening carefully as they slow down and tip over. For the atoms in your body, that’s enough to give some clues as to what kind of molecule, and what kind of tissue, they’re in. The machine listens to atoms in different places by changing the way it combines all the signals from billions of tiny antennae. It’s like a whispering gallery where we can play with the time that signals take to travel from different places, moving the focus back and forth through any part of your body, thousands of times a second.”
Jack pondered this explanation. Though it sounded complicated, in principle it wasn’t that much stranger than X-rays.
“The physics itself is old hat,” Stoney continued, “but for imaging, you need a very strong magnetic field, and you need to make sense of all the data you’ve gathered. Nevill Mott made the superconducting alloys for the magnets. And I managed to persuade Rosalind Franklin from Birkbeck to collaborate with us, to help perfect the fabrication process for the computing circuits. We cross-link lots of little Y-shaped DNA fragments, then selectively coat them with metal; Rosalind worked out a way to use X-ray crystallography for quality control. We paid her back with a purpose-built computer that will let her solve hydrated protein structures in real time, once she gets her hands on a bright enough X-ray source.” He held up a small, unprepossessing object, rimmed with protruding gold wires. “Each logic gate is roughly a hundred Ångstroms cubed, and we grow them in three-dimensional arrays. That’s a million, million, million switches in the palm of my hand.”
Jack didn’t know how to respond to this claim. Even when he couldn’t quite follow the man there was something mesmerising about his ramblings, like a cross between William Blake and nursery talk.
“If computers don’t excite you, we’re doing all kinds of other things with DNA.” Stoney ushered him into the next room, which was full of glassware, and seedlings in pots beneath strip lights. Two assistants seated at a bench were toiling over microscopes; another was dispensing fluids into test tubes with a device that looked like an overgrown eye-dropper.
“There are a dozen new species of rice, corn, and wheat here. They all have at least double the protein and mineral content of existing crops, and each one uses a different biochemical repertoire to protect itself against insects and fungi. Farmers have to get away from monocultures; it leaves them too vulnerable to disease, and too dependent on chemical pesticides.”
Jack said, “You’ve bred these? All these new varieties, in a matter of months?”
“No, no! Instead of hunting down the heritable traits we needed in the wild, and struggling for years to produce cross-breeds bearing all of them, we designed every trait from scratch. Then we manufactured DNA that would make the tools the plants need, and inserted it into their germ cells.”
Jack demanded angrily, “Who are you to say what a plant needs?”
Stoney shook his head innocently. “I took my advice from agricultural scientists, who took their advice from farmers. They know what pests and blights they’re up against. Food crops are as artificial as Pekinese. Nature didn’t hand them to us on a plate, and if they’re not working as well as we need them to, nature isn’t going to fix them for us.”
Jack glowered at him, but said nothing. He was beginning to understand why Willie had sent him here. The man came across as an enthusiastic tinkerer, but there was a breathtaking arrogance lurking behind the boyish exterior.
Stoney explained a collaboration he’d brokered between scientists in Cairo, Bogotá, London and Calcutta, to develop vaccines for polio, smallpox, malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, tuberculosis, influenza and leprosy. Some were the first of their kind; others were intended as replacements for existing vaccines. “It’s important that we create antigens without culturing the pathogens in animal cells that might themselves harbour viruses. The teams are all looking at variants on a simple, cheap technique that involves putting antigen genes into harmless bacteria that will double as delivery vehicles and adjuvants, then freeze-drying them into spores that can survive tropical heat without refrigeration.”
Jack was slightly mollified; this all sounded highly admirable. What business Stoney had instructing doctors on vaccines was another question. Presumably his jargon made sense to them, but when exactly had this mathematician acquired the training to make even the most modest suggestions on the topic?
“You’re having a remarkably productive year,” he observed.
Stoney smiled. “The muse comes and goes for all of us. But I’m really just the catalyst in most of this. I’ve been lucky enough to find some people — here in Cambridge, and further afield — who’ve been willing to chance their arm on some wild ideas. They’ve done the real work.” He gestured towards the next room. “My own pet projects are through here.”
The third room was full of electronic gadgets, wired up to picture tubes displaying both phosphorescent words and images resembling engineering blueprints come to life. In the middle of one bench, incongruously, sat a large cage containing several hamsters.
Stoney fiddled with one of the gadgets, and a face like a stylised drawing of a mask appeared on an adjacent screen. The mask looked around the room, then said, “Good morning, Robert. Good morning, Professor Hamilton.”
Jack said, “You had someone record those words?”
The mask replied, “No, Robert showed me photographs of all the teaching staff at Cambridge. If I see anyone I know from the photographs, I greet them.” The face was crudely rendered, but the hollow eyes seemed to meet Jack’s. Stoney explained, “It has no idea what it’s saying, of course. It’s just an exercise in face and voice recognition.”
Jack responded stiffly, “Of course.”
Stoney motioned to Jack to approach and examine the hamster cage. He obliged him. There were two adult animals, presumably a breeding pair. Two pink young were suckling from the mother, who reclined in a bed of straw.
“Look closely,” Stoney urged him. Jack peered into the nest, then cried out an obscenity and backed away.
One of the young was exactly what it seemed. The other was a machine, wrapped in ersatz skin, with a nozzle clamped to the warm teat.
“That’s the most monstrous thing I’ve ever seen!” Jack’s whole body was trembling. “What possible reason could you have to do that?”
Stoney laughed and made a reassuring gesture, as if his guest was a nervous child recoiling from a harmless toy. “It’s not hurting her! And the point is to discover what it takes for the mother to accept it. To ‘reproduce one’s kind’ means having some set of parameters as to what that is. Scent, and some aspects of appearance, are important cues in this case, but through trial and error I’ve also pinned down a set of behaviours that lets the simulacrum pass through every stage of the life cycle. An acceptable child, an acceptable sibling, an acceptable mate.”
Jack stared at him, nauseated. “These animals fuck your machines?”
Stoney was apologetic. “Yes, but hamsters will fuck anything. I’ll really have to shift to a more discerning species, in order to test that properly.”
Jack struggled to regain his composure. “What on Earth possessed you, to do this?”
“In the long run,” Stoney said mildly, “I believe this is something we’re going to need to understand far better than we do at present. Now that we can map the structures of the brain in fine detail, and match its raw complexity with our computers, it’s only a matt
er of a decade or so before we build machines that think.
“That in itself will be a vast endeavour, but I want to ensure that it’s not stillborn from the start. There’s not much point creating the most marvellous children in history, only to find that some awful mammalian instinct drives us to strangle them at birth.”
Jack sat in his study drinking whisky. He’d telephoned Joyce after dinner, and they’d chatted for a while, but it wasn’t the same as being with her. The weekends never came soon enough, and by Tuesday or Wednesday any sense of reassurance he’d gained from seeing her had slipped away entirely.
It was almost midnight now. After speaking to Joyce, he’d spent three more hours on the telephone, finding out what he could about Stoney. Milking his connections, such as they were; Jack had only been at Cambridge for five years, so he was still very much an outsider. Not that he’d ever been admitted into any inner circles back at Oxford: he’d always belonged to a small, quiet group of dissenters against the tide of fashion. Whatever else might be said about the Tiddlywinks, they’d never had their hands on the levers of academic power.
A year ago, while on sabbatical in Germany, Stoney had resigned suddenly from a position he’d held at Manchester for a decade. He’d returned to Cambridge, despite having no official posting to take up. He’d started collaborating informally with various people at the Cavendish, until the head of the place, Mott, had invented a job description for him, and given him a modest salary, the three rooms Jack had seen, and some students to assist him.
Stoney’s colleagues were uniformly amazed by his spate of successful inventions. Though none of his gadgets were based on entirely new science, his skill at seeing straight to the heart of existing theories and plucking some practical consequence from them was unprecedented. Jack had expected some jealous back-stabbing, but no one seemed to have a bad word to say about Stoney. He was willing to turn his scientific Midas touch to the service of anyone who approached him, and it sounded to Jack as if every would-be skeptic or enemy had been bought off with some rewarding insight into their own field.
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