“I don’t know why they couldn’t come over for a visit once in a while,” she’ll say, sighing over the latest batch of photos of gap-toothed kids with red-eye.
And Dad will grunt from behind the paper, “Leave them be, love. They’ve got their own lives to lead.”
One way and another you could say I enjoyed my time at Prince Albert. I made a lot of friends and although it was hard I coped with the academic side, thanks to Rodge. But nothing lasts for ever, does it? Towards the end of the course I could see the time coming when I’d have to get a job and I thought I ought to do something about it. Actually I didn’t need to exert myself too much because the companies who have a lot of vacancies for graduates send their people along to places like Prince Albert to give talks about how great they are to work for, and they’ll often conduct interviews at the same time. The “Milk Round” they call it. I put my name down and that’s how I got recruited by Telemax Engineering.
The pay wasn’t marvellous at Telemax but they were supposed to have a good in-house training scheme. What that meant was, as soon as you started getting interested in what you were doing, and maybe even a little bit competent at it, they moved you to another Section. There were some bits I liked. The radiofrequency transmitter work was good; you got to design real power circuitry. But then they moved me to microelectronics, and I was spending all day in front of a computer, simulating what would happen if I ever got to make this little square of silicon for real. Then there was antenna design, which was quite interesting again, but they moved me off that into production engineering. And so it went on. You know those old war films where there is this planning room that has a big table with a map on it, and a lot of girls in tight blouses standing around it with what look like billiard cues, and they’re pushing counters around on the map, moving a fleet to here and a squadron to there and a division to there? Well, that’s what I felt like: one of those counters being pushed around. If anyone did have the big picture, they certainly weren’t telling me. I stuck it out for two years and then I left. I worked in computer sales for a bit, but that didn’t suit me much either, and I considered teaching, but it’s not really my bag. On one of my visits home my parents asked me what I wanted to do and I just couldn’t tell them because I hadn’t a clue myself.
Then Mum had one of her bright ideas. “Why don’t you speak to your Uncle Douglas?” she said.
Uncle Douglas is Mum’s elder brother. He’s the only one in the family who has a head for business. He ran this hospital supply company for a number of years and he landed a large National Health Service contract, so it did pretty well. In the end it was taken over and as part of the deal he left with a large lump sum. Now he gets his broker to make more money for him while he plays golf. I can’t say the golf does much for his waistline, but that only adds to his general air of solidity. He’s not so much large, Uncle Douglas, as weighty. If he sits down in an armchair it looks like it will take nothing short of a crane to shift him. When he makes a gesture it’s only from the wrist. He reads the Financial Times and I think he’s still on a couple of company boards, so he stays reasonably in touch with the business world. The whole family looks on him as some sort of guru; when he speaks, everyone listens, and no one dares to contradict him. You can imagine the sort of conversation I had with him.
First of all he told me it was time to make the acquaintance of the real world—you know, like I’d been living on Mars—and then he kept asking questions that could only be answered in one way—his way, of course.
“Where do you think the money is these days, Michael?” (I forgot to say that Uncle Douglas calls me Michael as well. A lot.) He knew the answer to this one wasn’t coming from my direction so he supplied it himself. “Venture capital, Michael. Mark my words. There are a lot of rich people out there, and they’re looking out for ways of investing their money in new start-up companies with new inventions or new processes or new drugs.”
“But I don’t have anything new, Uncle.”
A flash of irritation crossed his face.
“No, Michael, I know that. But there are people who have these things and they are looking for financial backing. And they know perfectly well that no one’s going to give it to them unless they’re covered legally. Inventions have to be patented, Intellectual Property Rights have to be protected, drugs and devices have to meet regulatory standards in every country where they are to be sold. There’s your opportunity. It’s an unlimited market for someone who has some scientific skills combined with expertise in those branches of the law. What you have now is half an education; what you need, my boy, is the other half.”
Well, it seemed like good advice, and I didn’t have any better ideas, so I thought I’d better see about getting the other half. I signed up for an M.Sc. course in Inventions and the Law. At Prince Albert University, of course—well, where else should I go? I knew they had a School of Business Management, and it turned out that one of the courses was tailor-made. I knew the ropes there, and I was a graduate, so getting admitted was no big deal. I expect you think I was just trying to recapture a part of my life that I’d actually enjoyed, and looking back on it I suppose you could be right, but at the time I thought I was making a career move. Don’t laugh.
3
I suppose it won’t come as a large surprise to you that I was soon sorry I registered for the M.Sc. course in Inventions and the Law. It wasn’t that I couldn’t cope; in many ways it was a lot easier than my undergraduate course. And I’m not saying it wasn’t well run. There were bits of it that I enjoyed, like the training videos where a well-known comedy actor like John Cleese shows you all the ways you can screw up big time. But there was a lot of detailed stuff to remember, especially the case law. I’ve never been much for memory work. I mean, that sort of thing is fine if you’re thrilled to bits with the number of nerve cells you’ve been born with, but I’m not, and it seemed pointless to take up the few I’ve got with all the ways businesses could get it socked to them for not covering themselves properly.
It was beginning to dawn on me that something was missing. Everything I was dealing with in the course was on paper: you either read it or you wrote it. I still hankered after doing actual science, at least getting my hands dirty with the more experimental side of it. I wasn’t being unrealistic; I knew that academically I probably wasn’t up to running my own show. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t work as part of a team. I could be a technician, something like that. I was pretty good with instrumentation. The pay wasn’t all that good, and I dare say Uncle Douglas would have a fit, but at least I’d feel I was doing something worthwhile, something that actually interested me. The trouble was, I didn’t dare to chuck in the course. I’d already had a few false starts, and it wouldn’t look good on the old résumé if there was yet another thing I hadn’t been able to stick at.
On that particular day there wasn’t anything scheduled for the afternoon so I went for a stroll in Hyde Park. I walked for a long time and then I sat down on a bench by the Serpentine, and I thought about what I was going to do with my life. Some kids were around, sailing their toy boats on the lake. The wind was very changeable. A strong gust capsized one of the little dinghies, and it wasn’t hard to spot the owner because he was jumping up and down and howling for his dad to do something about it. But then a nice steady breeze came along and drove two of the other boats along at a good lick, with the kids running excitedly alongside them. And maybe watching those little boats cruising along helped me make my mind up.
By now I was pretty nifty at knowing the least I could get away with, and I reckoned I could coast along without too much effort if I just attended the classes and handed in the assignments, even if they weren’t brilliant. Once I’d got the M.Sc. I could either use it or do something totally different. Probably I’d end up doing something different, but at least I’d have the choice. So that’s what I decided to do about the course; I was going to cruise it.
I wondered if any of the other students ha
d problems like this, making up their minds about a career. Rodge for instance; I wondered what he was doing now. I’d lost touch with him completely. I hadn’t seen him since Finals, and he’d never given me a contact address. I’d assumed he’d go on to do a Ph.D. but I didn’t know where. The more I thought about it, the more I was curious to find out what had happened to him. Then I had an idea: I’d go and have a chat to Dr. Palmers.
Dr. Palmers was one of the lecturers on the physics course. He looked like he’d been a good athlete in his time, probably a distance runner. The really interesting thing about Dr. Palmers, though, was this uncanny knack he had of remembering all the students’ names. There were over a hundred of us in first year but two weeks into the course if you asked him a question he would know who you were, and he would say something like, “Well, Mr. Barrett, what we have to think about here is…” It was great, really, not just that he could do it, but that he felt it was worth the time and effort. I’ve got to say, it isn’t the easiest of times when you first go up to uni. I mean, you leave school, where you know the ropes and you know everyone and everyone knows you, and you’re thrown into a whole new environment where you’re not sure what’s required of you, with a load of people you’ve never met before and who don’t know you from Adam. You can feel a bit of a cipher in those first few weeks, and here was someone saying you actually mattered as an individual. I know it meant a lot to me, and the others probably felt the same way.
I suppose it was because he could be bothered to find out what our names were that he got lumbered with the job of keeping tabs on students after they left. So every time some daft Government Minister got it into his head that it would be nice to know how many students went into teaching, and how many into industry, and how many did higher degrees, and how many were sweeping the roads, the request would filter through the system and down to the departments, and he would be the one who had all that stuff at his fingertips for the physics students, and all the other staff could breathe a sigh of relief that this one had passed them by. So that’s why I went and knocked at his door.
He remembered my name, of course. It took him about twenty milliseconds, but he remembered. He had stuff on his desk, so you could see he was busy, but you’d never think so, the way he got up and greeted me and sat me down. He wanted to know everything I’d done, and what I was doing now, and I tried to make it look like I’d deliberately acquired some industrial experience and had my career path all mapped out. Well it wasn’t his problem and that’s not why I’d gone to see him. He found my entry on his computer database and he sat there, typing in the new information, but I suspect it wasn’t to help him remember: it was so he could respond to questions from daft Government Ministers. After a bit I took the opportunity to ask him about Rodge.
“Rodger Dukas? Yes, I remember him. Tall, fair hair, very intelligent. You two were friendly, weren’t you?”
“Yes, but I’ve lost touch. I was wondering if you knew what had happened to him.”
“Well, I’ve got an idea he did a Ph.D. here, but do you know, I’m not sure I’ve followed that one up? Let’s have a look.”
He started to tap at the keyboard again.
My goodness, I thought, you are slipping. Only had about four hundred students come through since us, and lectures to give and papers to write and here you are telling me you haven’t followed up Rodge’s career.
“Yes, here it is. Rodger Dukas. He registered for a Ph.D. in the engineering faculty: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. With Professor Ledsham. Now, has it been awarded yet….?” He hit a few more keys. “Yes, it was awarded last July. I don’t know where he went after that, though. If you ask over at Elec Eng they might be able to tell you.”
“I’ll do that. Thanks very much, Dr. Palmers.” I stood up to go.
“Perhaps you’d let me know if you find something out. I like to keep up-to-date if I can. Nice to see you again, Mr. Barrett.”
I assured him I’d pass any information back to him. Actually I was wondering what the hell Rodge was doing in Elec Eng. I thought for sure he’d do a higher degree in physics.
I walked out through the big glass doors of the Physics building into one of those lovely spring days when the sun is just hot enough to warm your bones. It was too nice to hurry. Even so it only took me a few minutes to wander over to Elec Eng. There’d been a lot of construction work going on here when we were students. I remembered them knocking down the old red-brick Engineering Sciences block. Those Victorian buildings were so over-specified they didn’t even need to sink new foundations—they just started again from ground level. Now I could see the finished result: a seven-storey slab of granite facings and tinted glass. The atrium covered the whole of the ground floor. I expect the architect was fishing for an award, because he’d designed it as a thoroughfare but it also doubled as social space; students were standing around nattering or sitting in groups on marble benches. There were islands in the floor with small trees and other plants, and low walls placed at right-angles to each other, and I suppose all this helped to baffle sound because it wasn’t all that noisy considering the number of people around. The offices and labs were obviously in the floors above. I read the signs and found my way to the School Administration Office on the first floor.
The Administration Office was open plan: modern fittings, brightly lit—carpeted too, in burnt orange, with one of those hard-wearing floor coverings—so it was quite comfortably furnished, in an institutional sort of way. I don’t know if the secretaries in the Office were really busier than Dr. Palmers but they certainly behaved like they were. I nailed one of them and stuck to my guns. This had to be the right place to come; it was where the post would be delivered. Someone like Rodge, who’d been there for three years, would be on a lot of mailing lists and he would still be getting post, and some of it might be important, so the secretaries had to have a forwarding address, didn’t they?
Actually it turned out to be simpler than that: he was still in the building.
4
“I think I know the person you mean,” the secretary was saying to me. “I can’t phone him, though, because his lab isn’t on the new network, and I can’t take you there because I can’t leave the office. Who did you say you were?”
“Mike…er, Michael Barrett. We were undergraduates here, over in Physics.”
“Well if I give you some directions, do you think you could find your own way?”
I followed her directions. First I went out through a pair of doors and down a couple of floors into the basement. After the Administration Office it was like entering Eastern Europe. Well actually I’ve never been to Eastern Europe, but I’ve seen a few films and in my mind it was how somewhere like the old Stasi headquarters would have looked on the inside. The stone staircase led down to a dusty corridor with dingy yellow walls and a high ceiling all covered with ducts and cables painted over in the same colour, except it was about three shades darker because of all those years of accumulated dust and grime. The floor had been coated at some stage with a dark red material, all cracked now and gritty underfoot. Considering how warm it was outside I was surprised how cool it was down here. I was half expecting to see dungeons. All this would have been part of the original Victorian building.
I followed the corridor round and took a left turn as instructed, and suddenly I was in front of a pair of wooden doors. There wasn’t a lot of varnish left on them, and from the amount of scuffing I’d say they’d been opened pretty frequently with a boot. On the left-hand door there were a couple of empty screw-holes where there’d once been a label. All that was left now was a half-torn sticker; I could make out part of a lightning flash, so I guessed it had once been a warning sign for high voltage. I looked around me but this had to be the lab; there just wasn’t anywhere else it could be. I knocked cautiously and went in.
It was a big room. What made it seem even larger was the way it was lit. The ceiling was very high and there was a bank of fluorescents suspend
ed from it. They lit the middle of the room, but because the ceiling didn’t reflect any light, the walls were pretty much in shadow. I could make out some cabling and switchgear and that was about it. The interesting bit was in the middle: there was a great cage there made of a fine copper mesh, and it formed a sort of room within a room. It was surrounded by equipment connected up with metal-clad cables. The air tasted musty, with a trace of that ozone smell that you often get around electrical equipment. There wasn’t any sign of Rodge in the main lab and from where I was I couldn’t see into the cage. If I got a bit closer, though, I could probably peek inside. I took a step forward, then thought better of it; if Rodge had just popped out for a moment and he came back and found me snooping around he wouldn’t be best pleased. So I was beginning to think I’d give it a miss and come back another time when I heard a small noise. I said “Hallo?” in a loud voice and a door in the side of the cage opened and there he was.
“Hello, Rodge,” I said.
“Oh, hello,” he replied, like the last time he’d seen me was yesterday instead of nearly four years ago.
“I was in the College, so I thought I’d look you up. I’m not interrupting anything important, am I?”
“No, you’re all right. I can get on with it later.”
There was a bit of an awkward moment. I thought maybe the best thing was to get him talking about his work. I waved at the equipment.
“This looks like a serious bit of kit. Those are lasers up there, aren’t they? I’ve never seen any as big as that.”
The Man in Two Bodies (British crime novel): A Dark Science Crime Caper Page 2