“So what’s the furthest we could go then, Rodge? I mean with the power we’ve got in the lab.”
“I don’t think we’d be seriously limited until we were out to about…” I pointed to the graph. “…here. Let’s see where that is, geographically.”
We went over to the map on the wall and I put a ruler against it.
“We could get out as far as the Blackwall Tunnel area,” I said. “Beyond that, I think we’d be pushing it. Look, that’s all right; this was only ever intended to be a prototype apparatus. I could do a whole lot more if I had an entire power station at my disposal.”
We both laughed, but I wasn’t joking entirely; I didn’t see why the thing couldn’t be scaled up in that way. I added:
“The important thing we’ve achieved, Mike, isn’t the distance we can go, it’s how precise we can be. We’ve got a lot of good data now. Within this radius of operation,” I used a finger to draw a rough circle on the map, “we can predict quite accurately where I’m going to land.”
“How accurately?”
“Well, if we always use the same GPS receiver to take the readings—”
“Which we always will.”
“—which, as you say, we always will—we can be accurate to better than one metre.”
Mike nodded. “That’s impressive. So what do you want to do next?”
“Well, to start with what I’d like to do is extend the deadline for return. Two minutes isn’t really long enough. Ten minutes would give me a bit more scope at the other end. But it’s up to you, Mike. I do need you to be in the lab, and I appreciate that it’s boring for you just waiting around for me.”
“No, I can cope with that. The interesting part for me is what you get up to during the projections. As long as you give me a reasonably detailed account when you get back—you know, like you have been doing up to now—I don’t mind waiting.”
“I’ll do that, of course. Look, would you like to swap places, have me project you for a change? Then you could experience it at first hand.”
Mike shook his head straight away.
“No thanks, Rodge. Believe me, I have no ambitions whatever in that direction.”
It was the response I’d expected and secretly I was glad. I was still the only person in the world who knew what it felt like to travel in an instant to a place maybe two miles away and then exist in two places at once for the next few minutes.
*
From my point of view the ten-minute projections were a great success. It gave me a chance to get more skilled at handling my projected self independently from the one in the cage. Mike asked me to explain how I did it.
“Well, I’ll try, Mike. You know the technique I developed for sorting out vision?”
“You concentrated on the new scene, didn’t you, until you weren’t aware of the cage any more.”
“That’s right. Well, this is very similar. First I focus my eyes on the new scene. When that’s nice and solid I watch my limbs. As I move them, I pay close attention to the sensations. This gives me a feel for where they are and how they’re moving in the new setting. Once I’ve done that I can stand up or walk or wave my arms around with my eyes closed if I want to.”
“Well it obviously works. The only Rodge I can see is the one in the cage, but he barely moves. In fact while you’re projected there’s nothing happening at all. Maybe I could bring a radio in; at least it would help to pass the time.”
“No—sorry, Mike, we can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Well, the one thing I haven’t been able to do is separate out sound. Everything reaches me from both settings and I can’t suppress any of it. I can cope with the hum of the equipment because it’s a constant background, but anything more than that would be too confusing. No, I’m afraid things have got to stay totally quiet in the lab, otherwise I won’t be able to make sense of what I hear when I’ve been projected. I’m sorry it’s boring for you. Perhaps you could bring a book in, or do some of your coursework.”
*
Things were running very smoothly now, and the procedure had become almost routine for both of us. Sometimes it took an effort of will to remind myself of the truly incredible thing we were doing. My mind was full of possibilities and experiments and I suppose I was even sifting through some of these in my sleep, because I woke up one morning with something new to try.
20
The question running through my mind was this: would it be possible to take some sort of receptacle with me and use it to bring an object back to the cage?
My first instinct was that it wouldn’t work. I’d be able to carry a box with me; that wouldn’t be a problem. But suppose I put a ball in the box at the other end? When Mike returned me to the cage, the box would surely pass through the ball or the ball through the box, and get left behind—in the same way as I passed through the wall of the cage and the wall of the building.
As I say, that was my initial reaction. But something about the symmetry of the situation made me try the calculation. I started by considering a spherical container, a resonating shell surrounding a non-resonating object. It turned out that the forces on one side balanced out those on the other, so the object always stayed inside. After that it was only half an hour’s work to generalize the calculation from a sphere to any irregularly shaped container. I concluded that it should work, and the only proviso was that the container had to be completely closed.
“What do you think, Mike?” I asked after I’d explained the idea to him.
“Well to be honest I couldn’t follow the calculation, but I think we ought to give it a try. What have we got to lose? Why don’t you buy a bag or something tomorrow morning, while I’m in my class? Then we can have a shot in the afternoon.”
The following morning I went down to High Street Kensington and bought a leather duffel bag. A nylon one would have been lighter, but I liked the design of the leather one better. It had a kind of flap inside that went over the contents and a good tight draw-string closure. When Mike came to the lab that afternoon we discussed the whole thing in more detail while the equipment was warming up. We decided to make the projection to St James’s Park. I’d been there before. At the Buckingham Palace end there were some nice flower gardens, and one of them had a rockery. The plan was to bring back one of the rocks.
*
I arrived not far from the path that ran along the side of the lake, carrying my new duffel bag. I looked around me but the only people I could see were a good distance away. The Palace was just visible over the tops of the trees. The royal standard was flying; Her Majesty must be in residence. I had the fleeting thought that it might be fun to project myself inside there some time. Present myself to the monarch. That would be a chuckle—marvellous publicity too! Still, one thing at a time. I had my bearings now so I started to walk briskly down towards the gardens. The rockery was just where I’d remembered seeing it.
I took another quick look around but there was no one close by. I stepped briskly forward and took hold of a rock. I couldn’t shift it. I stepped back and looked at it in disbelief. It wasn’t that big, how could it be that heavy? For a moment I thought it had been cemented in. Then it dawned on me. Because my mass was being shared between the two places, my muscles were only half their normal weight, and that meant they were only half as strong. I hadn’t noticed it before because all they’d been moving was my limbs, and their weight had halved too, so everything was in proportion. I thought about it for a bit. Then I opened the bag and put it on the ground. I chose a rock that wasn’t too big, imagined it to be twice the size it was, and put in the right amount of effort. It came up without much difficulty and I dropped it into the bag. Then I closed the flap over the top of the bag, drew the closure tight, and gave Mike the signal.
As soon as Mike had returned me to the cage he came round and opened the door. We looked expectantly at each other. Then I undid the draw-string and we looked in the bag.
“It’s still there.
Mike, it worked!”
Mike punched the air and shouted, “Yes!”
Even though my calculations had predicted it would happen I could hardly believe it. We took the bag into the lab, put it on the bench and Mike lifted out the rock. He grinned and handed it to me. As I took it from him I almost threw it up in the air.
“Watch out, Rodge! What are you doing?”
I laughed. “Nothing. I was expecting it to be twice as heavy, that’s all!”
Of course it felt light because I was back to normal strength now. I explained that part to Mike. Then we left the rock on the bench and went back to his flat. I was in a great mood the whole evening. My head was so full of possibilities I could hardly sleep at all that night.
I got up earlier than was usual for me and joined Mike for breakfast. He liked to have toast and marmalade and tea for breakfast; I only ever had coffee. I brought my mug to the table and sat down with him.
I took a gulp of coffee.
“I’ve been thinking, Mike. We’re ready to go public with this now. We could do a demonstration for the Royal Society! We could publish it in Nature! I bet we’d make the front cover! You can be a co-author, Mike.”
“No, thanks.”
I put down my coffee mug in surprise.
“Why? We’ll be famous!”
“Infamous more like.”
I couldn’t understand it. He was usually quite enthusiastic about what we were doing. Perhaps he hadn’t woken up fully. I decided to try again.
“But Mike! Think of what you could do! You could get oxygen, food and water to people trapped in a tunnel or a mine collapse. You could be at a business meeting miles away in an instant! I don’t know what the ultimate range would be. Matter waves aren’t refracted or reflected like electromagnetic waves so the curvature of the earth might be a problem. But even so the potential applications are endless…”
Mike stopped me dead in my tracks.
“You’re so brilliant, Rodge, and yet you so haven’t got it.”
21
“Why, what do you mean I haven’t got it?”
“I mean you’re going to have to keep a lid on this—you know that, don’t you? It’s far too dangerous. Right now you’re the only person who can do it. Okay, but once people know it can be done you won’t be able to stop it spreading. Look at nuclear weapons. At one time only the superpowers could make them. Now any tin-pot bloody country can do it.”
I suppose I was still looking blank. He regarded me patiently.
“Look, Rodge, you can pass through walls, right? Do you have any idea how disastrous it would be if this technology got out? It would be the worst thing to hit civilized society. It would be like locks were never invented. You can go anywhere—and so can anyone else if they get hold of it. Thieves will go in and clean out banks and post offices. Paedophiles will enter nurseries. Single women will be raped in their own bedrooms and no one will ever know who it was or how they got in. Do I need to go on?”
I realized that, of course; I just hadn’t thought it through in quite those terms. I felt quite unsettled. When you were dealing with the physics you knew where you were. Now Mike was talking about the implications for society and that was less familiar territory. I’d never seen any of that as a serious barrier to announcing the discovery. What had I been working for all this time? So that my work could go unreported, unexploited, unacclaimed? I couldn’t let go.
“Well, what about the armed services, and MI5, and MI6?” I challenged. “They’d keep it quiet. And they’d be interested all right. They could enter foreign embassies and terrorist headquarters and steal secret plans, all that spy stuff. Think what James Bond could do with it! You wouldn’t even need a James Bond—any filing clerk could do it! And if you had multiple set-ups like this one you could transport a whole division of crack commandos behind enemy lines!”
Mike’s voice was almost weary. “Look, Rodge, if the secret service took it on it would be for one of two reasons: to develop it or to suppress it. Either way there’s a good chance they’d quietly arrange for you to meet with a fatal accident, just to be certain the secret never got to the other side. If you flogged it to a foreign power it would be the same, only they’d probably kill you quicker, while the Brits were still fooling around with the paperwork.”
I sagged in my seat. I had the heavy feeling that he was right.
“All right, Mike. I take your point, but if I can’t publicize it and I can’t sell it, what can I do with it? It’s too good a thing just to let it go.”
He crunched into another piece of toast and marmalade and regarded me thoughtfully. Finally he said, in a quiet way:
“It seems to me that the strength of your position is precisely that no one else does know. If you keep it that way you have options. You stay a totally free agent.”
Before I could ask him exactly what he meant he’d jumped up and grabbed his jacket and a slim document case off a chair.
“Got to go,” he said, “I’ll come by at three o’clock.”
“Oh. Yes, all right. See you later.”
And I was left to my thoughts.
*
Usually I had the equipment up and running by the time Mike arrived in the lab, so that we could get straight on with the experiments. Only this time I didn’t. He saw at a glance that nothing was switched on. He didn’t seem in the least surprised by that. Nor was he surprised when I said I wanted to have a talk about the future direction of the work. I suggested we went back to his flat. We didn’t say any more about it until we’d got there. He made some tea and we sat down at the kitchen table.
“Look, Mike, I’ve been thinking. I have a problem, and I have a solution.”
“Okay, I’m listening.”
“We’ve talked about this before. I have a large overdraft at the bank, and the manager is calling it in. He’s not bluffing; he’s the sort of vindictive bastard who’ll make a personal crusade of it. Any time now he’s going to be sending in the heavies to collect payment or goods to an equivalent value. They don’t know I’ve moved to your place, but they’ll track me down soon enough, you can be sure of that. So I’m afraid this involves you too, because it’s your door they’ll be hammering on. I shouldn’t think the bailiffs will be too particular about whether they’re removing your stuff or mine. They could take our laptops, furniture, carpets, curtains, kitchen stuff, everything. We’ll end up sitting on the floor. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have got you into this in the first place.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. I knew all that when I took you in.”
“Well, don’t think I don’t appreciate it, Mike. But I’m not going to sit here and wait for it to happen. For a long time now I’ve been racking my brains for a way out of this. It seems to me that if I paid off a reasonable sum on account, as a show of good intent—you know, something like five thousand pounds—I could probably avoid the unpleasantness and buy myself some time. But where do I get five thousand pounds? That’s the problem. With me so far?”
“All the way.”
“All right. Well, the solution has been staring me in the face, only I didn’t see it until now. Look Mike, I can gain access to virtually anywhere in Central London. I don’t need a key, I can get in without anybody seeing me come or go, and no one except the two of us knows I can do it. It’s even better than that: I can take a bag with me and bring stuff back.”
“What are you saying?”
“Well, if it’s all right with you, I thought I’d rob a few banks.”
22
I’d been deliberately blunt to see what kind of reaction it would evoke. Frankly I was expecting an immediate outburst of righteous indignation about the immorality of the suggestion, my lack of principle, and so on. Instead he simply waited patiently for me to go on. It was as if he knew it was coming all along. It even crossed my mind that he had, in some way, planted the idea in my head, but I dismissed the thought. Mike was far too uncomplicated for that.
“All right,” I co
ntinued. “You’ll notice that I said banks, plural. I’m not thinking of large strong rooms and vaults. People spend months and months planning heists like that. They need a big team, and if they’re going to have enough to share around they have to lift really large amounts of money. For me it’s much easier. I can be in and out—I could do three in a morning without any problem. So I can afford to take less each time. I’m talking about cleaning out what’s behind the counters. I don’t know how much they keep there but it must be worth a few thousand on every trip. It’ll soon mount up.”
Still Mike was saying nothing, just watching me carefully.
“So I’d like you to help me do it, in two ways. Obviously by manning the equipment in the usual way. But secondly by helping me to establish the coordinates for the projection sites. We’d share the targets between us. All you have to do is go to the counter, take a reading with the GPS receiver, and store it. Obviously you have to be discreet about it but the GPS does look a bit like a mobile phone, so that shouldn’t be too difficult. The rest is straightforward. What do you say?”
Mike was thoughtful. Again I was expecting a deluge of moral objections but all he said was:
“And what’s in it for me?”
I was taken aback. I hadn’t thought it through that far.
“Obviously we’d split the proceeds, fifty-fifty,” I stammered out quickly. “I’m taking the major risks, but I can’t do it without you.”
There was another pause.
“Okay. But first I think we need to refine your plans somewhat.”
I was so relieved that he was going along with the idea that I didn’t care.
“Anything you say.”
“Well, for a start I think you should cut your teeth on a softer target. I would suggest smaller post offices, with one or at the most two, positions. Hit them at a quiet time, maybe around ten to nine in the morning, just before they’re open to the public—less chance of being seen. Choose a good morning, like the day they stock up for paying out state pensions—I think it’s Thursday. That way there’ll be more money in the drawers.”
The Man in Two Bodies (British crime novel): A Dark Science Crime Caper Page 11