‘I just… I just don’t know.’
Luke held up his hands towards Polaris, just visible to their right, and moved his right over his left to form an oval.
‘What are you doing?’
‘First principles,’ he said. ‘What’s the time?’
‘Five past twelve.’
‘Exactly?’
‘Yes.’ Connie always knew what time it was.
‘Well, we’ll start from here,’ said Luke. ‘52 12 0 0 7 0.’
Connie looked at him.
‘Is that…? You did not just work out the latitude and longitude? Are you dead reckoning? You must know them off by heart. Where are we…? North and east.’
Luke shrugged.
‘I’m a stranger here myself,’ he said. ‘Sorry. I was just meaning we should just deal with what we know, okay? In this job.’
Connie nodded, then sat up.
‘Oh,’ said Luke. ‘Are we going?’
‘Do I need to take you through this “wet” thing again?’
As he stood up, Connie noticed that underneath his coat he too was wearing his pyjamas; incredibly old-fashioned cotton pyjamas with a very faded pink stripe.
‘Are those pyjamas?’
He frowned.
‘It’s night-time isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re wearing pyjamas.’
‘Girls look cute out in pyjamas,’ said Connie. ‘Boys look creepy.’
‘I have a lot to learn,’ said Luke, looking down awkwardly.
‘A lot to learn about what?’ said Connie.
‘Um…’ Luke looked abashed.
‘Have you never worked on a mixed team before?’ she teased him. So many of these boys who grew up in maths found women an alien species, particularly if they’d been to all-boys schools. Luke must be another one.
Luke’s face lit up.
‘No!’ he said. ‘That’s probably why I keep making stupid… pyjama-based mistakes.’
Connie smiled.
‘That’s okay,’ she said. ‘We’re not that frightening.’
Luke raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything.
‘Right, we’d better get back. Now they’re watching us and everything. God, I really believed him when he said that. I guess the real work begins tomorrow.’ Connie realised she was babbling as they started down the path.
‘Looking for the cars driving round the hill,’ said Luke.
They reached the main road and turned off into their quad, bidding each other good night.
The man who had followed them up and into the undergrowth quietly continued on the same way, nodding quickly to the night porter as he passed.
Chapter Four
They sat as a group at breakfast, all anxious about the day ahead, reluctant to speak to one another. The refectory was a riotous affair: long, wooden benches where students bolted endless rounds of toast and drank unspeakable coffee. Evelyn had brought her own flask from the espresso machine she kept in her little kitchen. It was to become their new obsession, until every morning there were four – Luke and Ranjit didn’t drink it – big thermal cups lined up before they left for the day.
Because the days were long.
It reminded Connie of Rumpelstiltskin; of trying to spin straw into gold. The reams and reams of numbers never seemed to end; they spilled out of box after box. Everyone started at the beginning – if it was, of course, the beginning; that was not at all necessarily clear – and did everything with the numbers they could think of. It reminded Connie of the tests the school psychologists had given her when she was very small when they pulled her out of class, and all the grown-ups had looked at her and made her feel a freak.
They calculated entropy and plotted on graphs, broke down algebraically, counted, squared, triple-rooted, divided, stepped – all by hand, all on paper.
This was effectively what had happened: all large planets and stars gave out a background frequency, a low-level hum that simply indicated that they were there. According to the Mullard cosmologists, these were the frequencies of a sudden, mysterious radio signal from deepest space, pumped out with more energy than the sun could manage in a million years. Then it had immediately stopped.
They had run frequency analysis, SETI had got involved– briefly, rather over-excitedly – but the more computer simulations they ran, the less they learned. This little band, and their pencils and calculators, were the line of last resort.
‘This is like one of those awful spot quizzes where they called you out of class,’ grumbled Connie on the fourth morning. Luke was building an astonishing complicated origami pyramid of folded discarded paper. Connie hadn’t seen him do any work at all. What he did do was come by looking at the rest of their work, and immediately point out its flaws, sometimes writing them rapidly up on one of the blackboards. This was dispiriting, but incredibly impressive. Connie had never met a more natural-born mathematician in her life: his talent was fluent, completely innate. But he seemed completely uninterested in developing any theories himself.
‘But those bits were awesome!’ Arnold had said immediately she mentioned the quizzes. ‘The only times you didn’t have to take constant ritual abuse from the rest of the class! A quiet corner of the teachers’ staffroom and a stopwatch. And lots of attention!’
Ranjit sighed a happy sigh at the memory.
‘Did you ever get to go to those American mathematics conventions?’ said Arnold as he deftly multiplied three enormous numbers on his fingers, moving them like a speeding abacus. ‘Oh man, those things were heaven.’
‘I once did fifteen hours on the free Dance Dance Revolution they set up there,’ said Ranjit, sighing. ‘That was the best night of my life.’
‘The best night of your entire life?’ said Evelyn sternly. Ranjit blinked behind his glasses.
‘I’m a very good dancer,’ he said.
‘Man, the free snacks… nothing to do all day but beat the other guy. Or, erm, woman,’ said Arnold, to be polite.
‘Stupid show-off competitions,’ said Evelyn. ‘Mathematics is about investigating the subtle beauty of patterns hidden in rules, not showing off.’
‘Which is why,’ said Arnold, holding up a pile of paperwork, ‘they’ve given us this pile of stinking pig knickers to work with.’
‘Arnold, what do you think “knickers” means?’ asked Sé.
‘I’m enjoying you guys pretending you’ve ever seen a pair,’ snorted Evelyn.
‘Okay, come on, guys, let’s get on,’ begged Connie, as Luke came round again with his mantra: disprove, disprove, disprove. Although she was full of admiration for his methods – or would have been, if she could have figured out his methods at all – it was still rather dispiriting: the sense that you might be, in the end, working on nothing at all.
Still, they worked on, through the nights, eating together, discussing possibilities, but it was like knitting stars together: there were no threads they could tease out, nothing that made the numbers seem random, or deliberate, or anything other than, almost certainly, what Occam’s razor suggested they were, and Luke agreed: an inexplicable radioactive interference, a nothing from Kepler-186f.
Every so often Professor Hirati would bustle in, immaculately dressed, huffing and looking at his watch and mentioning other meetings he absolutely had to get to, and had they found anything? No, very good, that would be all.
By day nine, they were all heartily sick of it. Connie was dreaming in megahertz, the six digits, non-repeating, non-anything: 145.786; 120.634; 389.544. Plotted on a graph, they went up and down and round in completely random swathes, meaningless, simply patterns you could make with any numbers at any time, signifying nothing at all. Ranjit filled scratchy notebooks with lines of thick, black algorithms, playing with the numbers, twisting them, turning them, breaking them down and down again and again.
Arnold used the blackboards to work them in different dimensions; treat them as the lengths of great, hundred-sided, multidimensional s
hapes that cavorted uselessly up the dirty walls in marker pen. Luke drew two eyes and some teeth on one particularly dragonish extended shape, a polytope unfolded from four dimensions down to two.
One morning Connie came in after a night full of tumbled dreams in the four-poster bed, when the numbers had swelled up as great waves and threatened to pull her down, down beneath them and drown her. She felt tired and grumpy and unutterably fed up with the bunker, and the security cards, and getting cramp in her hand from trying to work out sums that had no solution or any solution.
Now, she turned up to see that Luke had managed to bring the piano back in and, not only that, he was lying underneath it, tightening and loosening strings in a way that was making it sound absolutely dreadful.
‘Stop torturing that instrument,’ said Connie, pushing her hair behind her ears. ‘It’s cruel. AND unusual.’
The two booted feet sticking out from underneath the stringed section of the piano failed to move. Instead, a long, pale hand appeared, groping at the keys from underneath and played a great crashing handful of discordant notes.
‘Sixth and a half,’ said Arnold without looking up from his mass of paper. ‘Luke, man, that’s a sixth and a half interval. You’re going to have to stop this. It’s like you’re weaponising the whole concept of music.’
‘You are. You’re breaking it,’ said Connie, as the hand went on, feeling its way around, and the tone of the notes went up and down like shrieks as he loosened and tightened the springs.
‘ARGH!’ she yelled finally, throwing down her stylus. She went and stood by the lid of the piano, holding it up. Over on the other side of the room, Sé was still working away quite happily. She shook her head in amazement.
‘I see more fingers, I am dropping this,’ she exclaimed loudly. ‘I mean it.’
The boots moved then, and Luke emerged smoothly into the room. He was lying on his back on a skateboard. The large, dark eyes behind the thick, dark-rimmed glasses were puzzled.
‘I’m just de-tempering the piano,’ he said.
‘Yes, well,’ said Connie. ‘You’re also de-tempering the maths department.’
‘I don’t mind it,’ said Sé mildly from the back of the room.
‘That’s because years of heavy metal have burned out your soul,’ said Connie. ‘And you can go and make horrible noises in the rec.’
‘I don’t like it in there,’ said Luke, patting his piano as if reluctant to leave it. ‘I feel sorry for the vending machines. And as I am 99.974 per cent convinced now that our work here is completely futile. I thought it was time for a little musical entertainment.’
‘ARGH!’ said Connie. ‘We have been cooped up in here for too long. Seriously. Hasn’t anyone got a home to go to? Arnold, aren’t you married?’
Arnold looked slightly less jolly than normal.
‘Uh, no, well, not exactly… I mean, not as such.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Uh, well. No. But I have, you know… a very busy avatar.’
His voice trailed off.
Connie turned to Evelyn.
‘What about you?’
‘I’m married to mathematics,’ said Evelyn stoutly. ‘Also, that cow left me back in Cairo. Witch.’
She scored her paper so hard with her pencil it tore. Sé raised his eyebrows.
‘Seriously, we’re all single?’ said Connie, aghast.
‘I’m engaged,’ volunteered Ranjit surprisingly. ‘What? I am! Since I was eleven. My parents were thrilled; she’s my second cousin, so it’s cool. Just waiting for her to turn twenty-one. She’s good at maths too.’
‘But she doesn’t live with you?’
‘What, before we’re married? Ha!’
Connie shook her head. ‘Amazing. You’d almost think they did this on purpose.’
‘You didn’t ask me,’ said Sé. Connie went slightly pink. She didn’t really want to know if Sé had a girlfriend.
‘Um…’ she muttered. ‘Do…?’
‘No,’ said Sé, looking down.
‘Nobody asked me either,’ Luke was complaining to Evelyn. She patted his hand. ‘That’s because you’re so weird,’ she said reassuringly. ‘Also, because your music is so horrible.’
‘I like it,’ said Luke, sidling back towards the piano.
‘I think I might have to give you a massive punch if you start making that noise again,’ said Arnold. ‘Sorry in advance.’ He held up a large, meaty knuckle. Luke’s forehead furrowed.
‘But,’ he said, ‘to propel that fist with the necessary force to injure me, you’d unbalance your height–weight ratio. Gravity wouldn’t cover it.’
‘Are you calling me fat?’ said Arnold, standing up.
‘Yes,’ said Luke, looking confused.
‘You come over here and I’ll solve that for you.’
‘I get that,’ said Luke wonderingly. ‘Because you wouldn’t want to expend any extra energy in moving. Exothermically it would be disadvantageous, plus your lung capacity —’
‘Okay,’ said Connie, standing up between them. ‘Enough. We need fresh air. And this room really, really, really needs fresh air. Mrs H is refusing to clean up any more, says we’re like a big bunch of monkeys.’
She tried not to look at Arnold, who was sadly examining his hairy knuckles.
‘Come on! Out! You can do more maths walking in the fresh air anyway!’
It was, they discovered to some surprise, the most beautiful spring day. The trees were full of blossom that drifted beneath their feet, the sun was warm on their backs and, as soon as they got moving out of the town, crossing the road heavy with bicycles, and set out on a trail that led to the woods, Connie took a deep breath and thought about what a good idea this was. Get everyone moving; stop them being so cranky and dependent on coffee all the time. Perhaps they’d find a country pub at the end of their walk, bond a little rather than fractious bickering as they each raced to prove something before the others; to solve a puzzle that perhaps could not be solved.
‘What do you think?’ she asked Evelyn as they walked together, scattered circles of daffodils lining their way.
‘Oh, we’re probably trying to fix somebody’s broken fricking telescope,’ said Evelyn, who was glancing at her watch and frowning. She liked to cook and eat her lunch at the same time every day, and this was it. ‘I don’t know why they’re making such a big fuss.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m calculating the subword complexity, looking at how often each possible pair of numbers is used, each triple and so on.’
Connie nodded.
‘But nothing, right?’
‘The weird thing is,’ said Evelyn, watching a wispy cloud disappear high in the sky. Ahead of them, Sé and Arnold were walking together, Arnold struggling a little to keep up with Sé’s lanky stride. It was odd, Connie reflected, to see Arnold outdoors. He didn’t belong outside; he was an inside cat, with a can of cola surgically attached to his left hand. Ranjit was scurrying along behind them, occasionally making a remark that the boys batted away like a fly. Luke, Connie noticed, had surreptitiously picked a daffodil and was looking at it curiously. ‘I’ve started to think it might be anything. Votes cast in the last Eurovision Song Contest. Stock market trades. Freckles per person. Stuff it couldn’t possibly be.’
‘I know. I know what you mean. Just seems so…’ Connie smiled. ‘I quite like it. Just the purity of digits, repeating, turning upside down. It’s like playing in a sandpit. No rules.’
‘No rules because we don’t know what they want,’ said Evelyn. ‘I like solving problems because I can kind of normalise the concept of an answer. Here… pfff.
‘It’s a far-off exploding sun,’ Evelyn went on, ‘sending random blazes across a distant galaxy. They’re just pissed because their stupid hyper-expensive telescope can’t pick it up. It’s probably incredibly beautiful. It’s a dying star: it’s even sad. But it doesn’t mean anything.’
They had reached the top of the
hill. Everyone had taken their coats off except Luke, who was still wearing the worn-in cord jacket with the patched elbows that was slightly too big for him.
From there they could see a long way across the flat countryside, all the way down to the river flowing through Ely and on towards the sea. Connie watched it wind its way across the flatlands, patchworked with green and great, tended hedges; sheep dotted here and there; cows burying their heads in the fresh, spring, green grass, the sweet, scattered daisies. It was a beautiful sight: England in all its calm and spectacular beauty. Steeples were dotted here and there, tiny clusters of towns. In the distance, a silent train slid past, bearing passengers to the great machine of London, sixty miles below.
Resistance is Futile Page 5