11
I had a pretty clear idea what was needed. Before I left the lab on Friday I shuffled through all the samples in that cupboard. When I left I had thirty-seven sheets, each one a different material but all the same size. The idea was to drop these, one at a time, into the space between the resonating beakers and see whether it had any effect. Obviously Rodge wasn’t going to be standing inside the cage doing it by hand, and you can be bloody sure that I wasn’t. So what I had to do was construct something very simple that we could control from outside.
I kept a few tools at the flat but not enough for this job so I decided to go home and use my Dad’s. My folks don’t usually go out on a Friday night, but I phoned my Mum just to check. Then I tossed the bare minimum into an overnight bag, made sure I had my old front door key and walked down to the Tube station at South Kensington.
The trains were packed with commuters at this time of day. I had to stand for a bit but it thinned out after Mile End. I got a seat and took out my notepad. By the time we’d reached Dagenham I had a rough drawing and a list of the materials I needed.
“Well, this is a nice surprise, Michael,” Mum said, as she emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands.
I gave her the usual peck on the cheek.
“How are you, Mum? All right?”
“Yes, love. You here for the weekend?”
“No, sorry—flying visit I’m afraid. I’ve got to go back to town tomorrow afternoon.”
“Aah. Well, better than never. Tea’s ready when you are.”
We chatted a bit over tea. Mum asked me about the course and I said it was going okay. Of course I didn’t say anything about the research or my little project.
After breakfast the following morning I followed Dad into the sitting room.
“Could I borrow the car, Dad? I need to go down the hardware store for a few odds and ends.”
He didn’t say anything, just dipped his hand into his trouser pocket and handed me the key to his small Rover.
“I’ll have a bit of woodworking to do,” I added. “I can do it in the garage. Okay if I use the tools? I’ll oil them afterwards.”
Dad always coats his tools with oil before he puts them away, to stop them rusting. If you forget to wipe them before you start it makes a hell of a mess of your hands—and the job.
“There’s some bits of timber in there if you want to use ’em,” he said.
I pictured that cobwebby corner of the garage, and suppressed a shudder.
“No, it’s okay,” I said airily. “I need some moulding and a length of beech dowel and stuff like that so I’ll buy it all together.”
Before long I was back from the shops and hard at work in the garage. I spent the rest of the morning sawing and drilling and loving every minute of it. Normally I busy myself a lot with my hands but ever since I’d joined that bloody M.Sc. course I’d done nothing but write essays and answer questions on test cases and learn international patent law and medical device regulations, and stuff like that. Now here I was, putting together an apparatus we were going to use for an experiment on Monday. I was like a dog with three tails.
I did everything but the glueing. I’d do that back at the flat so I could give it time to dry properly. I swept up the sawdust, oiled the tools and cleaned myself up. I looked at my watch. There was time to phone Suzy before lunch.
We had a nice chat. I found it easier to talk to her on the phone; maybe that was because we’d already broken the ice. I’d been trying to think of something we could do in the evening but the answer fell into my lap.
“Do you like the theatre, Mike?”
“Me? Oh yes, I love the theatre. I even love bad theatre.”
“Well, I don’t know about bad theatre…”
“No, I was only saying…”
“It’s just that Siobhan and I—Siobhan’s my flatmate—we had these tickets for a play, but she’s gone down with an awful cold and she doesn’t want to go anywhere now except bed. So would you like to go?”
I said, “That’d be great.” Then as an afterthought, “As long as it’s clearly understood that I pay my way.”
She laughed at that, a teasing chuckle that made me go buzz-buzz inside.
“What’s the play?”
I didn’t give a damn but I thought I ought to ask.
“I don’t know much about it because Siobhan booked it. I think it’s set in post-war Germany. She says it’s had very good reviews. It’s on at Wyndham’s. Shall we meet at the theatre? Seven o’clock?”
“Fine. I’ll see you then.”
I wasn’t going to insist on picking her up if she didn’t want me to.
*
I got there first. The foyer was packed with people all talking at the tops of their voices. Some were queuing to buy last-minute seats or programmes; others milled about or pushed past in a great waft of perfume or aftershave; and there was me, just trying to stand out of the way while I waited for her. I kept rising up on my toes to look this way and that but I needn’t have worried: I spotted her the moment she walked in. She was wearing a green dress and she had a bit more make-up on than when I’d seen her after work and she looked absolutely stunning. She handed the tickets to me, which I thought was a nice thing to do, and we went inside. As we were going to our seats I saw several chaps look her way and then cast envious glances at me. I felt totally great.
It was a good play, very cleverly done. In the interval there was a real press of people at the bar so I bought ice creams instead. That went down well. Afterwards we walked down Shaftesbury Avenue and she said she knew a good place so we went there. I could have fancied a pint, actually, but the hot chocolate was very nice. We sat there discussing the play and the motives of the characters and the performances and the way it’d been staged. I thought she was really perceptive; she’d certainly noticed things that had gone right past me. I think we both felt pretty relaxed. Even so I had the feeling she was keeping her distance. That was okay; I was happy to let things develop at their own pace. We arranged to meet for a sandwich at lunchtime on Monday and parted company at Piccadilly Underground station. We didn’t kiss but she gave my hand a squeeze and it seemed almost as good. I was ten feet tall again.
*
On Sunday morning I sat down at the kitchen table in my flat and stacked up the thirty-seven sheets of metal and plastic I’d taken from the laboratory. Then I took each sheet in turn and used a dob of epoxy to glue it into one of the grooves in my little apparatus. When it was finished it looked a bit like a toast rack, the toast being the sample sheets. Only the way I’d mounted them you could get any sample to swivel around one corner and come out of the stored position onto the table. I left the glue to set properly and after that I was at a bit of a loose end.
The rest of Sunday seemed to take for ever. I couldn’t wait to see Suzy again. I kept thinking about how she’d looked when she arrived at the theatre and afterwards, when we were chatting over the hot chocolate, the way her eyes sparkled if I managed to come out with anything amusing, and the little tweaks of her mouth that made the dimples go deeper. The flat felt strangely empty and I found myself wandering around tending to things that didn’t really need it. In the end I watched a lousy film on TV and went to bed.
12
Monday morning came and that dragged by as well, even though I was doing my best to concentrate on the tutorial. Finally it was lunchtime. I called for Suzy at the bank and we went to a place on Brompton Road where you can get a slice of pizza. I had to force myself to keep up a conversation; really and truly all I wanted was to be with her. I knew I was getting in deeper all the time but I just couldn’t help it. More to the point, I didn’t want to help it. Lunch hour went by in a flash and she had to go back to work. I had a couple of hours to finish my assignment for the day, with half my mind on Suzy and the other half on the experiment. It wasn’t easy.
*
I made it over to Elec Eng at four o’clock. That dank cavern of a lab seemed almost wel
coming now. My attention was on the cage and its equipment at the centre of the room and the dark recesses didn’t even register with me any more.
I had my wooden contraption with the samples in a carrier bag and I produced it with a bit of a flourish. Rodge seemed well impressed. I dipped into the carrier bag again and pulled out a reel of forty-pound breaking strain monofilament nylon I’d bought at a fishing tackle shop in Dagenham. I looped a bit of nylon through a hole in the end of one of the mouldings to show him how it worked. I simply tugged sharply upwards on the nylon and the sample swivelled around and fell out onto the bench under its own weight. Then I tugged upwards again, enough to get it over top dead centre and back into the rack. Rodge promptly dubbed it “Mike’s juke box”, and actually that was a pretty good description.
It took me about an hour to rig it up properly in the cage, threading thirty-seven lengths of nylon and taking them through the copper mesh on the roof and over to the control panel area. I tied a spare piece of dowel to the roof of the cage to lift the nylon clear and stop it chafing against the mesh. To keep the lengths of nylon from springing back, I knotted them to heavy nuts and bolts. It was all a bit crude but it would only be for one experiment so it wasn’t worth spending more time than that. I’d already numbered the ends of the pieces of moulding and written a key so as I’d know which sample was coming out of the rack at any one time.
All the time I was mucking about in and out of the cage Rodge wouldn’t have any power going to any of the equipment. As soon as I’d finished he closed the cage door, went round to the other side and flipped the switches to turn on the power supplies. Then we went off to the corner of the lab for a cup of coffee while they stabilized.
“I’ve been thinking about the experiment,” he said. “We need to ask ourselves what we’re looking for, and how much of it has to occur before we see it, and how long that’s going to take.”
I looked at him steadily while something went down inside me like a lift. I was feeling a right clown. Here I was, all pleased with myself for making a bit of kit, and not really thinking it through properly, and Rodge had gone straight to the heart of the problem. It just underlined the difference between a top flight researcher like him and a barely competent one like me.
“I suppose I just thought the second object would disappear if the matter waves were absorbed,” I volunteered.
“Well it’s a completely symmetrical system so if anything both will disappear. Yes, you may be right. But suppose there’s only a small amount of absorption? The mass will be removed gradually. Will we notice? You see, I haven’t the first idea where the mass would disappear from first. Obviously if it came off the outside there wouldn’t be a problem: we’d see it shrink or change shape. But what if it came out of every part of the object little by little? It would keep its structure right to the last moment. If it was made of metal or something like that, it would stay opaque until it was only a few atoms thick. Unless we let it go on for a long time we might not notice a thing. Hang on a moment.”
He scribbled in a notebook, then turned it around to show me what he’d written.
Mn = Mo(1-a)n
“Look at this, Mike. The system is actually very sensitive. You remember the coupled pendulum experiment? It takes several seconds for the swing to transfer from one pendulum to the other. Here a similar thing is happening but at about a hundred thousand times a second. Now what that means is that the matter waves pass back and forth through the material a great many times—in ten seconds it would be a million times. That’s ‘n’ in the formula. In each pass a fraction of the total gets absorbed, I’ve called it ‘a’ in this formula. It only needs the material to be slightly absorptive and the mass is going to disappear fast. Let’s do it on a spreadsheet.”
He picked up a soft case from under the bench and unzipped it, drew out a laptop and booted it up. I stood behind him so that I could see the screen. He tapped in the formulae, dragged down some cells to get a time series, and then started trying it out with different values. He turned slightly to me, the side of his face outlined in the glow from the screen. I could see he was a bit excited, enjoying himself. Just like me building the apparatus.
“You see? If the absorption is one part in a million, there’s only a hundredth of a percent left after ninety seconds. If the absorption is ten times higher,” he entered “1.00E-5” into a cell on the spreadsheet, “well, much faster, you get there in a little over ten seconds.”
“What about if it’s ten times lower?”
He entered “1.00E-7”.
“Ah, you see, totally different. After ninety seconds you’d still have over 40% left.”
“So you’re saying that if we watch it for a minute and a half we can be pretty sure to pick up any absorption more than one part in a million.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Well, that’s not bad, is it? It should be sensitive enough. Now the question is, what would be a good object to try it with?”
We both thought for a bit. Not a beaker of water, obviously. Nor a piece of cheese. You wanted something that wasn’t the same all the way through, something that would change dramatically if it lost a bit of mass. I tried hard to think.
“I’ve got it,” Rodge said suddenly. “What we need is a living organism!”
It was a brilliant idea, and I didn’t like the sound of it at all.
“What,” I said warily, “you mean like a rat?”
“Well, a rat would be ideal, but that’s going to be hard to get hold of at short notice. It doesn’t have to be a mammal. We can use a spider. There are always some in that corner, where those spare bits of racking are.”
He opened a drawer and took out a torch, picked up a glass tumbler from the side of the sink, tore the card front cover off his notebook, and then handed the whole lot to me.
“Here you are,” he said cheerily. “You get a spider while I’m putting this lot away.”
He’d powered down the laptop and was about to put it back in the case when he noticed that I hadn’t moved.
“What’s the matter?”
“Er, spiders aren’t exactly my thing, Rodge. I mean I’m very glad the good Creator included them in the grand scheme of things and all that, but I’m just as happy not to be around them, if you know what I mean.”
He looked at me with a sort of interested smile.
“All right.”
He picked up the torch, tumbler and card and went over to the corner. When he came back there was one of the biggest, blackest spiders I’ve ever seen scrambling around on the card inside the inverted glass. I smiled queasily, doing my best to suppress the panic.
“Er, Rodge, all this energy isn’t going to turn it into a ginormous one the size of a car, is it? Only I don’t think I could hack that.”
He grunted.
“You’ve been watching too many science fiction films. Get ready.”
13
Rodge went into the cage and put the spider, still under the glass, on the table. I stayed outside; I wasn’t going near it. He positioned it carefully, nodded his satisfaction and came out. I went round to the control panel. All the power supplies had stabilized, so as soon as Rodge had closed the cage door behind him I flicked on the charging circuits. Then I used the sliders to bring the radiated power up, just as I’d done before. He joined me and both of us looked intently into the cage. The spider had calmed down a bit now and it was wandering around the inside of the glass, exploring the limits of its new world. It still made my flesh crawl but I could take it as long as it stayed inside the glass. Fifteen seconds went by and the little rising choir of voices had flattened out; the capacitors were charged.
“Ready?” he said.
I glanced along the line of green and red lights. All present and correct.
“Yes,” I replied.
I flicked off all the charging switches and placed my finger lightly on the red button.
“Go.”
I pressed the red button and there was
the usual clonk, and now there were two spiders inside two glasses. I was transfixed.
“All right,” he said, “you can bring the radiated power down now. It should be stable.”
I did, and it was. We watched the spiders for a bit, and then I noticed something that made the hair prickle on my head.
“Hey, Rodge, did you see that? The one on the left moved, but the other one didn’t.”
We both watched for several minutes.
“You’re right, they can move independently. I suppose that’s reasonable, if you think about it. A passive object would have to produce two identical resonance images, but an active one might not. They could move differently as long as every part kept its relationship the same as in the original object. Interesting…”
I realized that my mouth was dry and my palms were sweaty. I rubbed them on my trousers. I was getting used to handling this powerful equipment, so I don’t think it was the experiment that was making me so tense, it was more that damned spider—or spiders. I thought, What does the world look like to you, spider, being in two places at once? It must be pretty confusing. Thinking about that made me feel a bit better. The spider clearly had more problems than I did.
“Well,” said Rodge, “shall we get on with it?”
“Oh, yes.” What with the spiders and all, I’d got distracted. We were supposed to be testing the absorption of the materials with what Rodge called my juke-box. I could see now that he’d placed it very well. It was between the two glasses, but off to one side.
“What’s first?” Rodge asked.
From where I was sitting I could see the reddish-brown sheen of the first sheet of material, but I checked the written key to be sure.
“Copper. 100%.”
“All right. Whenever you’re ready.”
I tugged sharply at the nylon, but not hard enough. The sheet came up and dropped back again. I had another try and it almost worked. On the third go it went over top dead centre and flopped down right between the beakers. I almost forgot to look at my watch; we were going to give it a minute and a half. A minute and a half later the spider in the original position was still exploring the edges where the glass met the card on the table. The other spider was trying to climb up the walls of the glass. Obviously nothing was happening. I put a tick on my key next to copper, and looked questioningly at Rodge. He nodded.
The Man in Two Bodies (British crime novel): A Dark Science Crime Caper Page 7