At last he’d won her. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to my guesthouse before we both get hypothermia. I’ll give you half an hour there to convince me you aren’t a lunatic, and then I’ll throw you out. Deal?’
‘It’s a deal,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
They went to the lane he’d first seen her go down, arriving at a B&B which, once he followed her inside, looked less lived-in than Mrs Moffat’s, more like a genuine hotel: the kind of place where a real journalist might choose to stay. She directed him to a small lounge whose tastefully co-ordinated decor was perfectly anonymous, free of personal items or any trace of identity.
‘We won’t be disturbed here,’ she said. ‘I’m the only guest.’ She sat down on the sofa, backing away slightly when Ringer placed himself there too. Though the two of them were at opposite ends, their knees almost touched. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘tell me about Craigcarron.’
Don had warned him not to talk about the project; but it was the only way he could be with Laura. ‘They’re developing a new kind of machine,’ he said, and began describing what little he knew about the delicate arrangement of tantalum mirrors that would supposedly harness the energy of empty space.
‘What’s this machine meant to do?’ she asked.
‘They’re trying to make a quantum computer – a device whose information is stored in elementary particles.’
‘Where’s the danger?’
‘It’s a little hard to explain,’ he told her.
‘I’m all ears,’ she said, opening her handbag to retrieve a small reporter’s notepad wedged inside. When she flicked it open, Ringer saw a page scrawled incomprehensibly in shorthand. ‘OK, tell me whatever I need to know about quantum computers. And make it simple enough for a journalist to understand.’
Ringer had an idea. Reaching inside his coat pocket, he took out the novel he’d put there earlier. ‘Have you ever read this?’ he asked, showing her E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr.
‘I’ve never heard of it,’ she said; though Helen had.
‘Didn’t you study German literature?’
She looked puzzled, then suspicious. ‘Please, no more mind-reading tricks.’
‘It’s a novel about a musician called Kreisler,’ he told her. ‘His pet cat writes a totally different story and mixes up the pages. So it’s a very jumbled novel – two stories at once, and you can’t tell which one’s real.’
‘So?’
‘Quantum computers are a bit like that,’ he said. ‘And they also involve a story about a cat.’
She looked at her watch. ‘You’ve got twenty minutes to tell me it,’ she said. ‘Then you’re out, remember?’
It was the tale he’d told her double, in another life. Ringer had described to Helen how Schrödinger went to an Alpine sanatorium in 1925 and discovered the equation that instantly lifted him from obscurity to fame. Now he told it to Laura. ‘Think of the Schrödinger equation as a machine for writing stories,’ he said. ‘You put in certain boundary conditions: the main characters, for example, or the beginnings of a plot. There’s a musician called Kreisler; his friend gives him a cat called Murr. Imagine all the different stories that might follow from that outline. There are infinitely many, of course. Try to imagine a book that somehow contains them all.’
‘It’d have to be a big book,’ said Laura.
‘The Schrödinger equation gives a way of working out every single one of them, and the big book is called the quantum wave function.’ Ringer was still holding Tomcat Murr in his hands. ‘Pretend this is more than simply the novel Hoffmann actually wrote and published. Think of it instead as the Big Book: the wave function containing every possible story of Kreisler and Murr. Now I open the book; equivalent to making an observation of the system.’ Ringer chose a page at random. ‘Out of all the possible stories, I’ve selected one in particular.’ He read – silently to himself – the first words he found:
Approaching Master Abraham’s house, Kreisler saw his own double, his own Self walking beside him. Stricken with terror, he burst inside the cottage and sank into a chair, gasping and deathly pale.
The words made Ringer shiver; it seemed an uncanny coincidence. The passage was about a man seeing his doppelgänger, and here beside him on the sofa was Helen’s double – her reinvented self. He decided to read out a later paragraph:
Master Abraham stepped outside, and straight away there appeared another Master Abraham standing beside him in the lamplight. Kreisler saw that it was an effect produced by a curved mirror.
There was the simple explanation of Kreisler’s ghost. But what about Helen’s?
She saw him lingering pensively over the page. ‘Twelve minutes,’ she reminded him.
He said, ‘Out of all the possible stories in the Big Book, my observation selects just one. This is called a quantum jump. Bohr explained it by saying that as soon as you take the tiniest peek, the Big Book disappears – the wave function collapses – leaving you with a single story. An electron has so many parallel narratives that it can be anywhere, until the moment it is observed and its particular story – its location – is fixed. Schrödinger never liked the idea, which is why he invented his own story about a cat in a box that is neither alive nor dead until, like the opening of a book, the box’s lid is lifted.’
For the first time, Laura jotted something in her notepad. ‘Wait a moment,’ she said. ‘All these analogies and metaphors are mixing me up. Is Schrödinger’s cat equal to your Big Book; or is the cat a character in the book?’
‘That’s a good question,’ he told her. ‘In fact it’s what physicists have been arguing about for the last eighty years. Is the wave function a real object, or is it a description of reality? A book can be either.’
She checked her watch again. ‘You’ve got ten minutes to start making sense, then I’m going to bed.’
Ringer said, ‘For many years, physicists have been trying to create a Big Book that would simulate interesting problems: a quantum computer. Most books, of course, deal with pretty mundane things like falling in love or creating a perfect soufflé. But if you could find the right boundary conditions – the right cast of characters – and if you could find a way of preventing anyone from looking inside the pages too soon and making it all collapse, then you could conjure up a Big Book that could do any calculation you like – it could simulate any system you chose. If it was big enough, it could simulate the universe itself.’
Time was running out, and Ringer got the feeling from Laura’s facial expression and lack of note-taking that his story wasn’t the kind of thing journalists find exciting.
‘This is all very well,’ she said, ‘but what are the dangers?’
‘At the sort of energy envisaged by the people at Craigcarron, it may not be possible to make the Big Book settle on a single story. It could remain trapped in several different contradictory ones.’
‘Sounds just like this Hoffmann novel,’ she said. ‘So apart from making people’s heads hurt, where’s the problem?’
‘The difference,’ said Ringer, ‘is that Tomcat Murr is a fictional story, made up a long time ago by somebody whose only purpose was to amuse his audience. My Big Book is an analogy for something that’s perfectly real – something you can make predictions with. My Big Book is the kind of thing that tells you: go to such and such a place at such and such a time, and this is exactly what you’ll see. And you go there, and you see it, just like the Big Book said. We physicists call that “reality”, and it has little to do with tricksy novels.’
As Ringer’s voice rose, he caught a renewed glimpse of Laura’s earlier fear, when he had first accosted her in the Pepperpot. He calmed himself, realizing he had become agitated because the memory that lingered in his mind was of the infuriating talk he had attended not long ago at the university – Vicious Cycloids – with its facile relativism, its denial of objective certainty, its intellectual game-playing. Life, he reminded himself, is not a narrative, not a
story we can interpret however we choose. If it were, we would be free to deny the Holocaust, the Big Bang, our own existence. What was at stake, Ringer knew, was the very thing that made the science he lived for meaningful, the same crucial ingredient that ensured Vicious Cycloids would always be no more than a form of entertainment, like a novel or a symphony, whose only criteria were those of personal or collective taste. That crucial ingredient was truth. Fact and logic were in peril, and Ringer was gripped by the heady thought that it might be his personal duty to protect them.
‘As far as I can gather,’ he continued, ‘the people at Craigcarron are involved in plans to set up a network of quantum computers, communicating through a mechanism called entanglement. Let’s suppose one of these computers produces a non-collapsible wave function corresponding to a high-energy photon. This photon could do lots of things – its Big Book is pretty enormous. It might get quickly absorbed by the tantalum mirror, in which case its story ends abruptly. Or perhaps it collides with a stray oxygen molecule that didn’t get evacuated properly from the machine, causing some other little sub-plot. It might even leak out through a crack in the device, enter the body of a worker and create a free radical inside his liver that eventually gives him cancer. If the wave function is prevented from collapsing, then perhaps – who knows – all of these mutually contradictory events will occur together.
‘The problem could be replicated in every other device in the network. Nobody knows exactly what this damned photon is supposed to be doing: there are two copies of the same particle, then four, eight. Soon there might be billions of phantom particles breeding and proliferating.’
Laura looked sceptical. ‘How do I know this tale isn’t simply another way of chatting up somebody who happens to look like an old flame of yours?
Ringer shook his head. ‘I admit this is all purely speculative – my fears are probably groundless. What’s more important is that a great deal of public money is going to be pumped into Craigcarron to create a device that will never work. There’s your story. But tell me, please, is there any chance you and Helen could be related? Lost sisters, perhaps?’
‘Forget it,’ she said emphatically. ‘It’s a crazy coincidence, nothing more. You obviously don’t like coincidences – I expect they don’t fit in with your rational scheme of things. Well, life’s full of them, and today you hit one.’ Her voice softened. ‘I take it you and Helen were pretty close. It must have been quite a shock, seeing me and thinking it was her. How long is it since you saw her?’
He added it up and was almost surprised. ‘Twenty years,’ he said.
‘People can change a lot in such a long time.’
‘I know,’ said Ringer. ‘Something reminded me of Helen recently, and since then it’s been like a chain of coincidences, one after another. Seeing you is just the latest of them.’
‘Except that I probably don’t look much like her at all,’ she said. ‘Was she a journalist too, by any chance?’
‘No,’ said Ringer. ‘She studied literature, and was a big fan of Thomas Mann. Though when I eventually tried reading his books I found them terribly boring. That’s the trouble with literature; it’s totally subjective. Like a love affair. Helen was in love with Mann, but over the years I’ve come across lots of people – intelligent critics who know about these things – who reckon he never deserved the reputation he got. I wouldn’t know; all I can say is that I’m glad I’m not a literary critic. You could spend your entire life in a bad marriage, infatuated with an author who’s completely worthless.’
‘Not like physics?’
‘No,’ said Ringer, ‘not like physics. Take away all the subjectivity – all the emotion, if you want to call it that – and what you’re left with is truth or falsehood.’
‘And no room for coincidence,’ Laura added. ‘Forgive me, but it sounds like you physicists might still be missing part of the picture.’ Then she directed her gaze to the book he still held. ‘Mind if I take a look?’
He passed it to her.
‘Let me check I’ve got it right,’ she said. ‘This book is meant to contain everything that could possibly happen.’ She opened it. ‘And now I’ve chosen one possibility that becomes real.’
‘I think you’re getting the hang of quantum theory,’ Ringer told her. She was looking at the page she’d chosen, reading silently. ‘Found anything interesting?’ he asked.
‘Oh, not really.’
‘You can borrow it if you like,’ he offered. It would be a way of ensuring a further meeting.
‘All right, I will.’ She put it into her handbag. ‘And thanks for the lecture. But now it’s getting late.’
‘Is my information any use to you?’
‘Perhaps,’ she said cryptically. Then she explained. ‘I’m investigating a new privately funded hospital not far from here. I’ve heard rumours about it.’ Ringer recalled the sign he’d seen for Burgh House. ‘Lots of people round here have been getting jobs at it,’ she continued, ‘but so far there are hardly any patients. Looks more like some kind of work-creation scheme. Very convenient, now that the power station – the area’s main employer – is being decommissioned.’
‘Don’t you know about the buy-out?’ he said. ‘Some outfit called the Rosier Corporation is taking over the plant; that’s why the research station is going into quantum computing.’
Laura pursed her lips and nodded thoughtfully. ‘Even more interesting,’ she said. ‘Big money’s being ploughed into the hospital. There may not be enough patients to fill it yet, but perhaps somebody expects there will be. There have been health problems in these parts for decades; high rates of lung cancer and leukaemia, almost certainly due to Craigcarron. Now there are reports of mental problems too. Depression and suicide have increased, as well as schizophrenia and premature Alzheimer’s. Some researchers in Edinburgh think they’ve identified a new brain condition causing false memories. Could be bigger than BSE.’
‘Somebody told me Burgh House is a mental hospital,’ he said.
‘It might be. Or else that’s a way of deterring the public. Given all these new changes at Craigcarron, I wonder if there could be some connection. The locals are tight-lipped, but I do know a great deal of work was done on converting the old hotel. Contractors were blasting out bits of the surrounding mountainside for months. Why? Have they got some kind of office block hidden underneath their empty little health centre in the middle of nowhere? And why all the security? Try driving up there and you soon come to a checkpoint.’
‘What do you think’s going on?’ asked Ringer.
‘That’s what I intend to find out,’ she said. ‘I’m going to Burgh House tomorrow. If I can’t bluff my way past the roadblock I’ll scramble up the hillside, but one way or another I’m going to get in there to see for myself.’
‘I’ll be going to Craigcarron,’ he reminded her. ‘I might be able to find out something for you.’
‘Let’s meet tomorrow night,’ she suggested. ‘How about dinner at the Pepperpot?’
‘Sounds good,’ said Ringer. Then she got to her feet as an indication that his time was up. Leading him to the front door, she shook hands with him in a cool, professional way; and as she reached for the latch on the door, Ringer became aware for the first time of something he hadn’t fully registered earlier while she was taking notes. Unlike Helen, Laura was right-handed. In fact, so much about her was different from Helen that he felt a fool to have been persuaded by the unreliable evidence of facial appearance alone. This woman was Laura; the chance resemblance meant nothing outside Ringer’s own mind. He was determined to help her.
‘We both need plenty of sleep,’ she said, showing him out. ‘We’ve got a big day tomorrow, and work to be done.’
HARRY’S TALE
A dark-haired woman was at his bedside. ‘Hello, Harry,’ she said. For a moment he wondered if she might be his wife; but as he looked at the elegant white-coated medic he realized it must be Dr Blake. He felt as though he hadn’t seen her
for weeks.
‘How are we today?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Is it such a difficult question?’
It was. While Harry searched vainly for an answer, Dr Blake made a note on her clipboard.
She said, ‘Can you tell me the name of the First Minister?’
‘Donald Davie.’
She jotted it down, then asked, ‘Can you remember what I told you yesterday about the tortoise and the hare?’
‘I didn’t see you yesterday,’ he said. ‘When will my wife come and get me out of here?’
‘You’ll see her soon, but you must be patient. It’s only been four days since you were admitted.’ He was sure Dr Blake was lying. He’d been here long enough to count at least a fortnight’s worth of hospital meals. He’d even begun hiding bits of food under his pillow as a way of keeping track. But whenever he looked under the pillow, the scraps were gone. If he said anything about it to Dr Blake she’d only tell him it was a false memory caused by AMD; but he knew the truth. Dr Blake didn’t want him to have any awareness of time. It would spoil her experiment.
‘Have you been trying to remember your life before you came here?’ Dr Blake asked.
Three memories had come to him: a prison camp in a snowstorm, a school lesson about the Constitution, and walking out of a bookshop with Professor Faust in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. All, he felt sure, were false.
‘It’s very hard to remember anything,’ he said.
‘That’s perfectly normal,’ she told him. ‘Your mind needs rest in order to heal; AMD often brings about a state of apathy and inertia that is really the brain’s way of protecting itself, like immobilizing a broken limb. By not trying to remember, not trying to understand, you can save your energy for the more important process of neural restructuring …’
‘Time of Restructuring,’ he interjected.
Dr Blake pursed her lips thoughtfully. ‘What can you tell me about the Time of Restructuring?’
‘Vernon Shaw,’ he said. ‘Heinrich Behring.’
Mobius Dick Page 12