“Do you mind if I take my jacket off?”
“No, go ahead. I’ll do the same.”
I got up and hung my jacket over the back of the chair. She took her jacket off and turned in her chair to hang it over the back. As she did so her breast tightened and the shadow of a white lacy undergarment showed briefly under the fabric of her blouse. I averted my eyes with difficulty. Everything about her was so utterly desirable. She turned back to the table and waited for me to open the conversation.
I still couldn’t think of anything to say. Half of me could hardly believe I’d got this far; the other half was wondering how long it would be before I put my size nine right in it and spoiled everything. The first thing that leapt into my head was, “Do you come here often?” I just managed to stop myself. Great opener, Mike. You’re asking her if she spends all her time in wine bars. How about, “I don’t usually pick up strange women”? Oh, brilliant, Mike. That makes her both strange and a pick-up. “I don’t do this every day”? Wonderful. Only every other day. Try again. Perhaps introduce yourself properly...
“I opened an account at your bank when I was a student here. I’ve come back to do a postgraduate course.”
“What in?” She sounded curious.
“It’s an M.Sc. in Inventions and the Law.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“Well, to be honest it sounds more interesting than it actually is.”
“What did you do for your first degree, then?”
“Physics.”
“Oh. I was never much good at physics. I did geography.”
“You did a degree in geography?”
From the way she stiffened I knew I’d sounded too surprised. Maybe she thought I was saying “A chap doesn’t expect a mere bank teller to have a degree.” I didn’t mean to—I was just tip-toeing through the minefield again. I covered myself quickly.
“It’s just that I would have expected something more like accountancy or an MBA.”
She relaxed a bit, and I breathed again.
“No, I wasn’t planning to go for a career in banking. I started doing a PGCE… “
“That’s a Postgraduate Certificate of Education? You wanted to be a teacher?”
“Yes. But when I started my placement I soon realized I’d made a mistake. The kids played me up dreadfully. They didn’t want to learn. I took this job because it paid, and there was a training element. And I did economic geography, so it wasn’t completely irrelevant.”
I nodded. I could have listened to her for ever but I realised it was my turn.
“I did a stint in industry, but I couldn’t get on with that either. Every time I got interested in something they moved me on. I enrolled on this course but now I’m not sure that’s for me, either. I can cope with it; it just doesn’t grab me, somehow.”
The waiter brought the glasses and poured the wine. It was nicely chilled. She lifted it to her nose and I did the same. It smelt of pineapple and gooseberries. I took a sip. It had a lovely refreshing zing to it, like that stuff that sprays off when you peel a lemon. I tried to relax a little.
“Being a geographer, you’ll know precisely in the world where this comes from, I suppose.” I grinned at her.
She accepted the challenge without hesitation.
“Marlborough. North-east corner of the South Island of New Zealand.”
“Ever been there?”
“No. I haven’t been to Australia or New Zealand. I’ve been to South America, though. Costa Rica.”
“Wow, that’s pretty exotic. How did that come about?”
“Well, in my third year I did a project on management of natural resources in Central American economies. I used Costa Rica as an example. I got really interested. So after my exams I went on a youth adventure course. I spent three months there. My parents paid for it. A sort of graduation present, although they gave it to me before the results were out, bless them. It was wonderful.”
Her dark eyes were dreamy. The pupils were just huge. We sipped some more wine. I tried not to take too much. I figured the longer it lasted the longer I could keep her there. She might not be up for a second glass.
“I’d like to do a bit more travelling,” I said. I’ve only ever got as far as the continent. I did one of those Eurorail trips during my second long vacation. Covered quite a bit of ground. It was good fun.”
I could see that the conversation was running out. I didn’t want any more awkward silences so I ran on a bit.
“I’m helping out with a bit of research in my spare time. A friend of mine is a postdoc here, so I’m lending a hand.”
“What are you doing?”
She would ask that, of course. I’d been stupid to go there.
“Well, it’s a bit complicated. It has to do with the physics of matter.”
“Oh. You must be very bright.”
“Who, me? No, not me! Rodge is the brains behind it. I’m just a hack technician. It’s good, though. It’s what I’d really like to be involved in if I had half a chance. You know, something where each day is different, each day brings something unexpected. Even if it’s a problem.”
I was thinking about the burnt out capacitor. She was nodding and it dawned on me, uncomfortably, that her job must be pretty routine. So I asked:
“Do you, er, like what you’re doing? Your job?”
“It’s all right. I’ve been with them for nearly four years now so the novelty’s wearing thin. But there’s scope for advancement.”
“You seem to enjoy it. I mean, you’re good with customers. When you look after me I always go out feeling ten feet tall.”
She laughed, and I felt ridiculously pleased.
“A job’s as interesting as you make it. But it can drive you up the wall a bit at times. We had a busy lunch hour, with queues on every position, and I had to deal with someone paying in. Counting coins and putting them into bags with everyone tutting and tapping their feet.”
“And then an impertinent young man asks you out for coffee.”
She pursed her lips in a rueful smile. “I could hardly believe your nerve. But it did brighten up my afternoon. Thanks for that.”
It looked like we might be heading for an awkward silence again, so I asked her to tell me a bit more about Costa Rica. As I expected, she didn’t need a whole lot of encouragement. I asked her about the climate, the plant life, whether there were problems with deforestation, like in Brazil. I knew I was on my back foot here, not knowing anything about South America, but I wasn’t too bothered. Everyone has holes in their knowledge; it shouldn’t stop you asking reasonably intelligent questions as long as you’re actually interested in the answers, and I was. There’s a difference between being ignorant and being stupid. I asked her about the insects; I’d heard they have some huge ones there. She said she hadn’t come across any, except for the big butterflies. That was a relief; I can cope with butterflies.
She finished her wine, flicked a paper napkin out of a little stack on the table, dabbed it around her mouth and put it on the table. Just seeing the traces of lipstick on it made my heart bang. She glanced at a dainty wristwatch. I knew what was coming.
“Look, this has been lovely but I’ve got to be on my way.”
“Sure, whatever. Have you got far to go?”
“No, not far. Notting Hill. I share a flat with a girlfriend. What about you?”
“I rent a flat in Queens Gate. It’s very handy for the college. Er, look Suzy, I’d love to see you again, but I don’t want to push my company if you’re already seeing someone.”
“I’m a free agent.”
Internally I breathed a sigh of relief.
“So could we do something like this again?”
“Okay. But I pay my way. Understood?”
“Yeah, sure. Great. Oh, by the way, it’s a little embarrassing to ask you at the bank. Is there some other way I can contact you?”
She laughed and I guessed she was remembering how awkward I must have looked on the othe
r side of the glass.
“I’ll give you my mobile number,” she said, and wrote it on the paper napkin that was lying on the table. Then she noticed the lipstick marks and realized it was the one she’d already used.
“Oh, sorry…” She reached for another one.
“No, that’s fine,” I said firmly, picking up the napkin.
“I’ll walk you down to the station,” I said, reaching for my jacket and making sure that the paper napkin was tucked securely into the pocket.
10
On Friday afternoon I walked briskly over to Electrical Engineering. It was another clear, warm day, and my eyes hurt from the sunlight reflecting off the glazed façades. After that, going down the stairs to Rodge’s lab was like descending into the underworld.
I asked him about the power supply that had cooked but he dismissed it quickly; he’d only had to replace the capacitor and it was working fine now. In fact he already had the power supplies running at voltage. He was impatient to do the experiment again.
We went into the cage. He’d put two empty glass beakers in there, and they were sitting in the middle of the table. He took a water bottle and filled each one about two-thirds full. Then he picked up a brown glass chemical bottle; I couldn’t see the label. He unscrewed the cap and gently shook a few small purple crystals into the palm of his hand. I recognized them straight away: potassium permanganate.
“A small refinement,” he said.
He tipped the purple permanganate crystals into the water in one beaker. A little plume of colour curled up from the crystals, like smoke from a chimney. He swirled the beaker slightly and put it down. He picked up the other beaker; obviously he wasn’t planning to leave that one in the cage.
“This can be for comparison,” he said. “You’ll see why later. Ready?”
I was, of course, so I put on the protective specs and took up my position at the panel and went through the same sequence as before, charging the capacitors until the green lights came on, putting all my fingers behind the sliders to bring up the radiated power, then switching off the charging circuits so that the red lights went out. Rodge wasn’t sitting down this time; he was watching my moves, but he still wasn’t hanging over me. He hadn’t said anything, so I put my finger on the red button and glanced back at him.
“Okay to go ahead?”
“Yes. Watch carefully.”
Well, I’d heard that one before but all the same I watched carefully and pushed the button, and the four-drawer filing cabinet went clonk, and then something seemed to go wrong with my eyes.
A moment ago there had been one beaker of water; now there were two, about two feet apart. Each of them had an identical little curl of purple smoke from the permanganate crystals. I tried to rub my eyes, forgetting I was wearing the protective spectacles, and knocked them onto the floor. I picked them up, but just before I put them on again I sneaked a quick look into the cage. No, it was nothing to do with the specs; there were still two beakers there.
I looked round a little desperately at Rodge. He was standing there, the comparison beaker still on the bench next to him. He didn’t need to ask what I’d seen; my expression must have said it all.
“All right,” he said, “you can bring the radiated power down now.”
I pulled the sliders swiftly back to the zero position, expecting the two images to become one. They were still there. I felt a moment of panic. Again I turned to Rodge.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” he said, with a tolerant smile. “But if you think about it, it’s to be expected. Like I said, there’s no friction or other influence to wind down the energy in the matter waves so the resonance is quite stable. I’ve had it going for hours.”
“Then for God’s sake how do you stop it?”
“Do you see a power supply there labelled ‘OH’?”
For each power supply there was a dial with a black plastic knob underneath it, and between the two was a small embossed label. I scanned the labels and found one that said “–OH”.
“Okay, got it.”
“Right. Now follow this sequence. Three steps. One, bring the radiated power up again. Two, reduce the voltage on that supply by fifty volts. Three, bring the power smoothly down again.”
I advanced the sliders, then turned the large knob under the “–OH” label anti-clockwise, bringing the needle on the dial down, and then pulled smoothly back on the sliders. I checked on the cage and did a double take. There was only one beaker.
I turned to him again, questions all over my face.
“I’ll explain. You remember what I told you before? Every substance is held together by chemical bonds. We’re using broad spectrum electromagnetic radiation to put all of those bonds into resonance, right?”
I nodded.
“Well,” he continued, “the radiation sources are in groups, each group connected to a different power supply. I’ve given each supply a name—for convenience it’s the name of the most important chemical bond in that group.”
He tapped the large black knob labelled “-OH”.
“This supply includes the –OH bond. Water is absolutely chock full of them. When you take it off its proper working voltage you detune the radiation enough to take that bond off resonance. So the mass resonance collapses on that one and it drags all the others back with it. Simple as that.”
“I see,” I said weakly.
“Now, there’s something else I want to show you. Come into the cage.”
On the way in he picked up the second beaker and an instrument with a probe dangling on a lead. It turned out to be an electronic thermometer. He dropped the probe into the beaker on the table in the cage and we read the display. Of course it was easy enough to keep track of which beaker was which, because he’d only put the permanganate crystals into the one in the cage. The thermometer registered 24.3˚C. Then he dropped the probe into the second beaker, the one he’d kept outside the cage. The temperature in that one was 24.2˚C. The difference in temperature was only 0.1˚C.
“You see? All that energy focused on it and it barely rises in temperature. That’s because the conditions are optimized for harnessing the energy as matter waves instead of heat.”
“That’s impressive,” I said.
I meant it. Actually I was blown away by what I’d seen. And there were loads of questions clambering into my mind.
“Rodge, that power supply I turned down. You said it affected the –OH bond. But glass doesn’t have any of those bonds, does it? I thought it was basically silicon dioxide. Why doesn’t the water shift and leave the beaker behind?”
“It doesn’t matter which bond you detune. As soon as a resonance collapses it drags everything back with it. Where the water goes the beaker has to follow. If you detuned the bonds in the glass, the beaker would go and the water would follow. The atoms have to keep their relationship with each other.”
I nodded slowly. I was beginning to get the hang of this. But there were still things that bothered me.
“Those beakers, when they were, er, in mass resonance. They were a couple of feet apart. Why that distance? Why not an inch? Why not a mile?”
“Good question. It seems to depend on the size of the dollop of energy you inject when you set up the resonant state, but I haven’t been able to work out what the precise relationship is. That’s one of the things you could help me with. Of course we’re only working with a fraction of the available power. I’m talking about the right-hand bank now—you know, the part that charges the capacitors.”
“Yeah, I knew what you meant. What about direction? Why does the second beaker appear along the bench. Why not in another direction, like towards the door?”
“Another good question. The dollop of energy we put in, it’s in the form of electromagnetic waves, like the rest, but they’re plane polarized. At the moment I’ve got the plane parallel to the length of the cage. I could change it if I wanted to, and then they’d separate in a different direction.”
“Okay. And s
o far as you know those two beakers would have gone on like that, existing side by side, forever?”
“Well I’ve only tested it for a few hours, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t go on for days and weeks. I don’t know of anything that absorbs matter waves.”
“That’s something else we ought to look at.”
“You’re right, Mike, we should. It would be easy enough. All we need to do is drop various materials in the beam and see what happens. Actually there’s a cupboard here full of materials samples. Shall we take a look?”
He turned and went out of the cage. Just before following him I passed a hand quickly over the table, where that mysterious second beaker had appeared. I didn’t think Rodge was the sort to go in for conjuring tricks but I needed to reassure myself. There was nothing there. I followed him over to the other side of the lab, where the pendulums were set up. He was opening a cupboard under the bench. It was the wrong one so he closed it and opened another. He reached inside and came out with some rectangular sheets, which he put on the bench near the desk lamps so that we could see them. They were all the same size, about as big as a glossy magazine but only a millimetre or two thick. Some were metal, some looked like plastic.
“Metallurgy again. I think these were test materials for practical classes. They probably used them to compare metals with other common materials.”
I had a closer look. Each one had the details of the material written on them in spirit marker. Taking four from the top of the pile I saw “Nickel 100%”, “Methyl methacrylate”, “PTFE”, “Martensitic steel 15% chromium, 1% carbon”, “Methyl methacrylate”—ah, so there were repeats. You’d expect that from practical class materials. I thought about it for a moment and then turned to Rodge.
“I can do something with these. Do you mind if I take them away?”
“Not at all. Be my guest.”
“It’s Friday. I can do it over the weekend. I’ll have it ready for Monday.”
“Fine, we’ll run the experiment on Monday. I’ll be interested to see what happens.”
“Me too,” I said. “Me too.”
The Man in Two Bodies (British crime novel): A Dark Science Crime Caper Page 6