“Yes...” His mind still seemed to be somewhere else. Suddenly he looked at me and said, “Would you like a guided tour?”
“Well, yes, if you’ve got the time.”
He led me over, talking on the way.
“The bits and pieces over here are test instruments, but the main bank there consists of oscillators and magnetrons and power amplifiers and they feed through to antennae inside the roof of the cage. It’s all carefully matched, and they need quite a bit of tuning to get peak performance. These are high current sources for the photodiode arrays; you can just see the arrays if you look inside.” He pointed. “See?”
We walked around to the other side for a better view.
“You’re right about the long boxes: they’re high-power lasers; they fire directly inwards. I prefer to keep all the major components outside the cage; they’re more accessible for maintenance. Also these are continuous operation, not pulsed, and it’s easier to keep them cool that way.”
“Lasers like that cost a small fortune and you’ve got, what, eight of them!”
“Mmm. Actually they didn’t cost me anything. You remember Dr. Ellis, over in Physics? Lectured us in Applied Optics?”
“Yes.” I remembered him all right. That was another course I didn’t understand.
“Well his group designs them. They formed a spin-off company, so all these are being produced commercially now. These were the prototypes. I just asked if there were any going spare and they let me have the lot. I think they were glad to free up some space. For them this is yesterday’s technology, but for me they’re ideal. They’re not as pretty as the commercial item but they work perfectly well—actually better, from my point of view, because there are some adjustments you can make that were left out of the production version.”
He opened the door of the cage and I followed him inside. There was a stout wooden table in the centre and when I looked up I could see that the antennae and arrays and lasers were all pointing downward roughly at the middle of the table. Rodge must have seen me take that in.
“Basically the idea is to generate electromagnetic radiation and focus it here.” He put his finger in the middle of the table. “Of course, there’s nothing new about that in itself. What’s interesting about this apparatus is that I can do it at almost any wavelength from terahertz, radiofrequency and microwaves at the long end, getting shorter and shorter through infra-red, as far as the red end of the visible spectrum. All at high power. And I can operate all the generators at the same time.”
Of course by this time I was itching to know what he was using all this stuff for, but it wouldn’t do to rush it. I knew Rodge. Right now he was talking freely, but he could clam up just as quickly if he thought I was crowding him, so the best thing was just to keep the conversation going.
“God, that must take some power!”
Rodge looked pleased.
“More than a hundred and fifty kilowatts. You couldn’t do it in a normal lab. Do you know what this lab used to be?”
“No, tell me.”
“We’re in what used to be the basement of the Engineering Sciences building. Forty or fifty years ago this was a metallurgy lab. They had several induction furnaces in here. The furnaces have long gone but the power supply’s still here.” He pointed to some of the thick cables I’d noticed earlier, travelling up the walls. “Those aren’t solid cables; they’re water-cooled copper tubes. They have to be; they carry a colossal current and the heating effect is immense. So you see, I’ve got power on tap here. And it’s all three-phase, so the National Grid doesn’t get unbalanced when I’m doing a run. It’s not on for long anyway; only a few seconds at a time.”
“And the screened cage is to prevent electromagnetic interference with other equipment in the building?”
“Yes. But not just in this building. When I’m doing a run I could make mobile phones squawk in Venezuela. I have to contain it.”
“You know, Rodge, I’ve been wondering what you’re doing over here in Elec Eng. I could have sworn you’d do a Ph.D. in physics.”
“Well, there is an explanation. Look, would you like a coffee or do you have to get away or something?”
5
I followed him into one of the shadowy areas of the outer lab. It took a while for my eyes to adjust after the brightly lit cage but when they did I was surprised to see a sink and a kettle and a small fridge there. Health and Safety haven’t been inspecting here lately, then, I thought. I mean, I’ve never worked in any lab where you were allowed to eat or drink in the same room. Just for interest I looked at the plugs to see if they carried stickers to say when the earth and fuse rating were last checked. Nothing. This place was amazing. In one way it was stacked with state-of-the-art instrumentation. In other ways it was trapped in a time warp. Rodge carried on talking as he filled the kettle and switched it on.
“You’re right, of course, Mike: Physics was the obvious place for me to go. During Final Year I started to talk to some of the research groups over there about doing a higher degree. The Department is heavily into nuclear physics. As it turns out, an awful lot of that consists of designing and building special sensor arrays to carry out experiments at big accelerators like Grenoble. Then they get a few hours of beam time and spend the next few months analysing the collisions. It didn’t appeal to me at all. If things went wrong with any of the equipment it might be months before you got another shot. I prefer to be in control of what’s going on.”
“You were keen on doing astrophysics at one time, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I was, because I wanted to study matter, and space is your alternative laboratory for that. But the situation there is even worse. You spend a year or more building an experiment, and then the launch vehicle explodes and it’s all gone in an instant. Or you wait all year just for a bit of time on an orbiting instrument or a radio telescope. No, as I say, I like to run my own show. By the time we took Finals I still hadn’t got anything lined up. Then I saw a Studentship advertised on the Postgraduate Noticeboard. It was in Electrical Engineering, with Professor Ledsham, to study the interaction of electromagnetic energy with living systems.”
“The interaction of… that’s a hot topic, isn’t it? All these people worrying about what it does to you living under power lines or using mobile phones?”
“That’s right. I think the big electricity generating companies are getting worried about potential law suits. So one of them funded this Studentship to look into it properly. I went and had a chat with Prof Ledsham. He was most apologetic. He’d applied for the grant months before, he said, and by the time it was awarded he’d been appointed Dean of the School. He didn’t want to turn the grant down but at the same time he wanted to make it clear to me that he wouldn’t be around much to supervise my work, that I’d be on my own a lot of the time. He seemed to think that might put me off. Actually that sold it to me more than anything else.
“There was quite a bit of bench money with the Studentship. I used most of it to buy good quality test equipment, like that high-speed sampling oscilloscope over there. I figured that way I could always build what I couldn’t afford to buy.”
“So did you build much of this, then?”
“Quite a bit. Not the lasers and more specialised stuff like that, of course, but a lot of the rest. It took about a year and a half to get it all together. But then I wasn’t just equipping myself to do the Ph.D. work.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I won’t go into it now, but I had some other experiments in mind, far more interesting than Ledsham’s study.”
Again I wondered what it was that was so interesting, but he obviously wasn’t ready to talk about it yet.
“Ledsham’s project was just bread-and-butter stuff but I knew as long as I completed it I’d get my Ph.D. It wasn’t hard once everything was up and running. To start with I used phantoms.”
“Phantoms?”
“Yes, you know, they’re sort of mannequins designed to i
mitate a human subject.”
The kettle was boiling now and it clicked off, but if Rodge had heard it he was ignoring it.
“I measured field strengths and temperature rise and that sort of thing. Repeated it at different wavelengths and with different types of modulation. Then I did the same thing on real organs like brain, lungs, and liver.”
I blinked. It was the casual way he dropped it into the conversation—as if playing with blood and guts was the most natural thing in the world.
“Where did you get stuff like that?”
“Oh, I got them from an abattoir. They were fresh enough, but still dead, of course. What I really needed was living tissue, with the blood flowing and all the normal chemistry going on. In other words I needed a live animal. We’ve got no facilities for that sort of thing here, and the premises aren’t licensed by the Home Office. So I went over to Queens College and talked to the Head of Psychology there. He arranged for me to collaborate with a postgrad in his department, a chap called Tom Mayhew. There was a lot of paperwork to go through but finally we got authority to do some studies on rats. I couldn’t move the equipment so he’d bring the animals over here first thing in the morning, and I’d irradiate them with the equivalent of having a mobile glued to your ear twenty-four hours a day, every day for a year. Then he’d take them back to Queens and do behavioural tests. I must say he was good with the statistical analysis.”
That was rare praise from Rodge. The guy must have been a genius.
He broke off to make the coffee. He put a spoonful of instant into each mug, poured in some water, gave it a quick stir and added a splash of milk to his. Then he pushed the other mug and the milk carton my way. I picked up the wet spoon he’d used to stir the coffee and helped myself to sugar from an old jam jar with the label still on it. I tried to avoid the lumps. It wasn’t silver service, but as a student I was well used to that.
“From time to time Ledsham would call me into his office to talk about progress. I think he only did it because postgraduate supervision is regulated and he had to set a good example. I could see his mind was always on something else. I’d feed him a bit each time I saw him, but what I gave him was only the tip of the iceberg; I already had more than enough results for my thesis. Doing it this way kept him sweet, though; he thought I was making steady progress and I could get on with doing my own thing. Tom Mayhew and I wrote a paper on the rat work and we put Ledsham’s name on it. Really he didn’t deserve to be an author because he didn’t have the first clue about what was in the paper, but we thought it was the right thing to do, politically. And it gave him a paper to wave under the nose of the electricity company. But that’s about the extent of his involvement. He hasn’t been down here more than once the whole time I’ve been here.”
He took a sip of his coffee and I did the same. It tasted like mud, actually, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“After I got the Ph.D. I wanted to carry on with my own research, of course, but Ledsham wasn’t so keen. Perhaps I was too independent.”
I didn’t know Ledsham but I could feel a certain sympathy for him. He’d be far too clobbered with administration to stay in touch with what was going on in his field or even in his own lab. If I was his research student I’d still give him a bit of respect. After all, the man’s made it to Professor at a top university, so he’s not a dope, is he? But Rodge wouldn’t see it that way. He didn’t make allowances: people were useful or they weren’t. Not the easiest person to have in your lab.
“I managed to persuade him eventually, though. That was last summer. He’s probably forgotten all about me by now.”
All this time Rodge was looking at a point somewhere above my head and making sort of throwaway gestures with his hands like none of this actually mattered. He was always like that with people—it was one of the things that turned them off him—but usually he didn’t act that way when I was around. I suppose it had been a while, after all, and he wasn’t totally comfortable with me yet.
“Well you are pretty tucked away down here, aren’t you?”
Suddenly I had eye contact.
“That’s the beauty of it, Mike! Look at this place. Bad lighting, old-fashioned wooden lab benches, peeling paint, bit of damp on the walls, no windows. There’s no telephone or network connection because they didn’t want the expense of running cabling down here. Nobody wants this place. Not when they can have light, airy rooms, white laminate bench-tops and new lab furniture and over-bench power supplies and ethernet points, not to mention windows with a view. So they stay upstairs and I stay downstairs. It’s ideal for me. I’ve got the space for the cage and the equipment, an incredible power supply to run it, and no one is saying ‘Tut, tut, you’re only a postdoc, you shouldn’t have all this space for yourself and we need it for somebody else.’”
I nodded my understanding. I suppose I’d been so focused on what he was saying I’d forgotten how lousy the coffee was, because by now I’d drunk it down to a sort of brown sludge at the bottom of the mug. It looked like he’d finished his too. Still he made no effort to wind up the conversation. He seemed quite glad to have someone to talk to.
“What about you, Mike, what have you been up to?”
I gave him a run-down on what I’d been doing, more or less as I told you before, but I kept it short. Rodge doesn’t usually take much interest in what other people are doing so I was flattered he’d asked at all, but I had no idea how long I could keep his attention. I hadn’t lost him yet, though.
“I didn’t really have you pegged as a sort of lawyer-cum-patent-agent. How are you finding the course?”
“Oh, it’s all right. Well, no, it isn’t all right, actually. If I’m honest, I’m bored witless with it. What I’d really like to do is research—not just development, real research—but I only got a Lower Second, so that’s that.”
He looked at me, chewing his lip thoughtfully.
“You could do a Ph.D. if you wanted to, Mike. There’s a shortage of candidates, you know. Once upon a time you’d have had to get an Upper Second or a First, but not now. And you’ve acquired some useful postgraduate experience.”
“I know, and I’d probably enjoy it while I was doing it. The problem would come afterwards. I’ve got to be realistic, Rodge. I think I’m okay technically, but I don’t see myself actually in charge of a project, running a research group. And with a Ph.D. I’d be over-qualified for the sort of job I can apply for now. It’s different for you. When we were doing physics, most of were struggling just to pass the course, but not you. I always had the feeling that you were already looking ahead, equipping yourself to do something… well, something extraordinary, something beyond our horizon. I do envy you. It would be really good to be part of something like that.”
While I was talking I was pushing a few grains of sugar around on the benchtop with my finger, lining them up this way and then that way, and not looking at him. Then he said something that brought my head up with a jerk.
“Well, I could certainly use some help here.”
“Really? Are you serious? Team up together? Like the old days?”
“Well, yes, I suppose so. The trouble is I haven’t got any money to pay you with.”
We both fell silent, thinking about it. Then I said:
“What’s your pattern of work here, Rodge? I mean, what time of day would you be doing the experiments?”
“Well, I like to work late, analysing results or doing calculations, here or at my flat—I always do that best at night. Then I sleep late, so I don’t usually get in before lunchtime. I set up the equipment and do any tuning or calibration that’s needed. After that I run experiments from about four o’clock to ten o’clock or so, depending on how it’s going.”
I considered it for a moment.
“Okay. Look, it makes sense for me to finish this damned course, now that I’ve started, and I’ve got a small grant to do it, which keeps me going. There’s continuous assessment on the coursework and I have to pass a written
exam at the end, but it’s no big deal. The formal part of the course is over now; usually it’s just a tutorial in the morning and then we get on with our assignments. If I do the bare minimum I can be finished by about four in the afternoon. Maybe even earlier. After that I could come over here and give you a hand.”
“Fine, if that suits you. It would be off the record, of course, but I can’t see anyone getting excited about it. Security won’t stop you; there are so many students coming and going for one course or another that no one will even notice. And they never come down here, even when they’re doing the rounds at night.”
“Great. When can we start?”
“As soon as you like.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Sure, why not? I’ll bring you up to date on what I’m doing and then we can familiarize you with the equipment.”
We got up and shook hands. I couldn’t remember ever shaking hands with him before.
So that’s how we got started again, the two of us, just like it used to be. Only better.
6
Of course I was very excited. I still hadn’t the faintest idea what Rodge was up to, but it was Rodge, so you could bet it was mind-bendingly original. What if I couldn’t understand it? I had to understand it! Rodge would soon lose patience if I couldn’t follow what he was doing. I might have to read it up a bit. He’d told me what he’d done for his Ph.D.; that seemed fairly straightforward, but he said he was planning to use the same equipment for something more interesting. I could hardly wait to find out what it was. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it and I don’t mind saying I had some problems concentrating on my course. I sat through the tutorial with my mind elsewhere, and then afterwards I fiddled around with my assignment. Eventually I managed to complete it after a fashion and hurried over to Elec Eng at four o’clock.
Rodge was ready for me. It was clear at the outset he wasn’t just going to use me as a pair of hands; he wanted me to understand what we were doing. He’d rigged up a sort of framework on a bench at the side of the lab. This was well out of the pool of light from the fluorescents so he’d brought over a couple of desk lamps. He switched them on as I came over and then I could see things properly. There were two upright retort stands and clamped horizontally between them was a piece of rope, which looked to me like a length of washing line. Dangling from the rope were two pendulums. They were identical in every way: the bobs were two-hundred-gram balance weights and the strings that suspended them were exactly the same length.
The Man in Two Bodies (British crime novel): A Dark Science Crime Caper Page 3