Making History

by Stephen Fry

  This rush of bitter thoughts came about as a result of Jane and me hurling ourselves into another row. I had turned up at Newnham looking forward to a warm hug after the shock of the Fraser-Stuart debacle.

  “Well for goodness sake,” said Jane. “What did you expect? You didn’t really mean to include all that sentimental puke, did you? In an academic thesis?”

  Hurt, I explained that I had looked on them as prose poems.

  “That’s right, Pup. Prose poems. I must try something similar in my next paper. ‘He bucked and writhed on top of her, his mind rac­ing with the freedom of the act. Pure! Sterile! Free to love without consequence! Suddenly he was master of all time and space! It was as if . . .’”

  “I got some skinless chicken breasts from Sainsbury’s,” I inter­rupted coldly. “I’ll go through and cube them.”

  I sealed the flesh in hot olive oil in a marked manner while she opened a smug bottle of wine in a fashion more irritating than lan­guage could ever describe. In itself what we historians like to call a casus belli.

  “It’s easy for scientists. You just do the sums. Yes no, right wrong, black white.”

  “Horse shit, dear.”

  “You told me yourself. All the answers are sealed up in little pack­ets all over the universe. All you have to do is open them. Here’s the gene that gives some people music, here’s one that makes you a saint. There’s a particle that tells you how heavy the universe is, there’s another one that explains how it all began.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I said. It’s all so simple. If only we soul­less nerds were as intelligent as you sensitive historians we would have had it all sorted out centuries ago.”

  “I’m not saying that!” I banged the pan down angrily. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. You deliberately have to misunder­stand me, don’t you?”

  “I’m going to watch television. Your wine’s on the table.”

  As I mixed the Thai green curry paste and rinsed the rice, the arguments rose, tossed and seethed inside me. The arrogance, I said to myself, the arrogance of these people. I banged down wooden spoons and crashed the wok lid shut in time to each win­ning point that I played in my head. It’s as if scientists exert every effort of will they possess deliberately to find the least significant problems in the world and explain them. Art matters. Happiness matters. Love matters. Good matters. Evil matters. Slam the fridge door. They are the only things that matter and they are of course precisely the things that science goes out of its way to ignore. Another five minutes to soak up the water and stock, I suppose. You people treat art as if it’s a disease—fuck, that’s hot—or an evolutionary mechanism, pleasure as if it’s a—shit, I’ve broken it—we never hear you say, “ooh, we’ve discovered that those electrons are evil and these protons are good,” do we? Everything’s morally neutral in your universe, yet a child of two can tell you nothing is morally neutral. Bastards. Suckmothers. Smug, smuggy, smuggery smuggers.

  “Ready!”

  “In a sec!”

  I wrapped the warm bread in paper napkins and poured myself another glass. And the contempt, the breathtaking, arrogant con­tempt for those who wade about in the marshy bog of actual, mucky human motives and desires. Because our method is “unscientific”—well of course our method is unscientific, darling. Real problems aren’t number-shaped, they’re people-shaped.

  “Mn-hm! Smells good.”

  “I know what you think,” I say, assuming that all the time that she has been sat in front of the television, she too has been rehearsing arguments. “You think science can only be understood by scientists. Anyone who hasn’t been through the initiation ceremony is auto­matically disqualified from talking about it. Whereas any scientist can rabbit on about Napoleon or Shakespeare with as much authority as anyone else.”

  “Haa! Hot!” Jane gives herself time to think about this by going to the sink and pouring herself a cup of water.

  “All I’m saying is,” I press home my advantage, “we live for sev­enty or eighty years on this planet. Which is more important, that we understand the physical principles behind the atomic bomb, or that we look at human motive so as to stop it from being used?”

  “Why not have a crack at both?”

  “Yes. Sure. Yeah. In an ideal world, absolutely. But let’s face it, you know. To understand something as complex as how a nuclear bomb works involves dedication to a particular discipline that takes time and commitment . . .”

  “I could explain it to you in less than four minutes. I should be fascinated to hear anyone explain to me the human motives behind war and destruction in so short a time. Pass the bottle over, will you?”

  “Ah! Exactly. Exactly!” I stab the table with a finger. “The sim­plicity of science is like a religion. It seems to give you the answers, but . . .”

  “Pup, you just said that to understand something as complex as a nuclear bomb takes time and commitment.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “Oh well, I must be hearing things then. Sorry.”

  “Look!” I’m getting fevered now. “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with science . . .”

  “Phew!”

  “. . . it’s just that it never looks at the things that really matter.”

  “It looks at the things that really matter to science, though. I mean, that’s why we have different subjects surely?”

  “Yeah, but other subjects aren’t blindly worshiped as if they have to contain the whole truth.”

  “And science is?”

  “You know it is!”

  “Not by me it isn’t. And it doesn’t seem to be blindly worshiped by you either.” She starts to mop up the curry with her nan. “But tell you what, Pup. There are thousands of scientists here in Cambridge. You introduce me to all those who blindly worship science because it contains the whole truth and I’ll have them drummed out of the uni­versity for insanity and incompetence. How’s that?”

  “Well obviously you don’t admit it! You pretend to be all humble and doubting and awestruck and ‘touching the face of God’ and all that shit, but let’s face it, I mean come on!”

  “Ah! Well put. Is there any more of this?”

  “On the cooker. What I’m saying, what I’m saying is . . . science doesn’t know everything.”

  “No. That’s certainly true. That doesn’t mean that it knows noth­ing, does it though? You going to have any more?”

  “Thanks.”

  “I mean, Puppy, the fact that science can’t explain why Mozart could do what he did, that doesn’t disqualify us from speculating on the composition of liver cells does it? Or does it?”

  “It is absolutely impossible to talk to you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t. I’m very sorry. I don’t mean it to be.”

  There you have Jane in a nutshell. There you have scientists in a nutshell. Wriggle, wriggle, wriggle. They suck.

  She was reading some South American novelist when I put my bedside light out. “Ner-night,” she mumbled.

  I stared at the ceiling. “That man Hamilton,” I said. “Remember him? In Dunblane. He walks into a primary school gymnasium with four handguns. In three minutes, fifteen five-year-olds and a teacher are dead. A human being points a gun at a child and watches the bul­let explode in its skull. Picture the screams, the blood, the complete incomprehension in those children’s eyes. Yet he does it again and again and again. Aiming and pulling the trigger.”

  She put the book down. “What are you trying to say?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. But isn’t that what we should be try­ing to understand?”

  “I hope you aren’t bringing up that dreadful case as proof that your heart is bigger than mine, or your subject more important.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I don’t. Really I don’t.”

 
“Pup, you’re crying!”

  “It’s nothing.”

  Pumping along Queens’ Road the next morning I explained the whole deal to myself. Humiliation. It was that simple. Fraser-Stuart had hurt me more than I had been prepared to admit. It was all a big, angry blush. I had behaved like a spoilt child because I was scared of the prospect of my passage out of studenthood and into the land of grown-ups. That was cool. It was no more than a natural little tan­trum. Like I said about doors, about hovering on thresholds. Saying farewell to the long, happy process of being a good, clever little boy who writes essays and earns praise and writes more essays and earns more praise. At seven I was smarter than most ten-year-olds, at four­teen smarter than a seventeen-year-old, at seventeen smarter than a twenty-year-old. Twenty-four now, I was no smarter than any other twenty-four-year-old around the place and anyway, it was no longer a race and there were no more prizes for being a prodigy. Everyone had caught up with me and I knew, I understood with a sharp gut stab of horror, that the danger now was that I would stand still while they raced past. One self-righteous, puritanical little outburst was permissible, surely, before I began the long uphill slog to discipline and diligence, integrity and industry, caution and care? I was allowed to kick and scream just once as I watched the dazzle and brilliance of youth cloud over.

  Like I say, I don’t half think some crap sometimes.

  Along the Madingley Road I skimmed, bent low over the handle­bars. The Cavendish laboratories loomed ahead, not a cathedral to the antichrist, just a building, an assembly of edge-of-town sheds. The people who labored there had good hearts and bad hearts like anyone else. They didn’t regard themselves as holding the only key to human understanding. They just hunted their particles, their genes, their forces and their wave forms, like historians hunting for documents or twitchers scanning the skies for red kites. Jane must think I’m mad. On the verge of a breakdown. No, she understands, bless her buns. She knows exactly what’s what and she loves it. Mummy’s little handful.

  The original Cavendish laboratories, where Rutherford sharpened the ax that split his first atom, are in the center of Cambridge, but the new building is out past Churchill College and towards the American Cemetery and Madingley.

  Is sunset still a golden sea

  From Haslingfield to Madingley?

  No, Rupert dear, it isn’t. More of a carbon monoxide fog, I’m afraid. Nor does the church clock stand at ten to three. As for there be­ing honey still for tea, you’ll have to ask Jeffrey Archer, since he owns the Old Vicarage now. Perhaps someone should write a new “Grantchester.”

  Say, stand the bollards yet in rows

  Mute guardians of the contraflows?

  Are there stabbings after dark

  And is it still a bitch to park?

  God bless our century. The main lab too, like an office block: all glass, swinging doors and “Reception! May I help you at all?” Priva­tized peak caps, sign-in books, laminated visitor badges, the whole vindaloo.

  If there is a word to describe our age, it must be Security, or to put it another way, Insecurity. From the neurotic insecurity of Freud, by way of the insecurities of the Kaiser, the Führer, Eisen­hower and Stalin, right up to the terrors of the citizens of the mod­ern world—

  THEY ARE OUT THERE!

  The enemy. They will break into your car, burgle your house, molest your children, consign you to hellfire, murder you for drug money, force you to face Mecca, infect your blood, outlaw your sexual pref­erences, erode your pension, pollute your beaches, censor your thoughts, steal your ideas, poison your air, threaten your values, use foul language on your television, destroy your security. Keep them away! Lock them out! Hide them from sight! Bury them!

  Half my friends from school have—in sharp contradistinction to my own previously explained failure in this regard—successfully rechristened themselves Speeder, Bozzle, Volo, Turtle, Grip and Janga, pierced any spare folds of flesh they can and pinned them with gold, silver and brass and hit the road. They march down the high streets of southern towns in antipollution masks, hoisting skull and crossbones banners: they’ll fight against the car, the Criminal Justice Act, highways, the felling of trees, the raising of power plants . . . any­thing. They want to be the ones locked out; they like to be thought of as dangerous; they enjoy their exile.

  And they think I’m a dick.

  I went to visit Janga last year, in Brighton, one of the places where she and her Traveler friends congregate, and I could tell, oh yes, I could tell, that these free souls thought me quite the little dick. Were I a real dick, mind, and a nasty dick at that, I would say to you at this point that they had no objection at all to my buying them drink after drink after drink in the pubs, that it posed no moral problem for them whatsoever to send me out to the minimarket at eight in the morning to buy their milk and bread and newspapers. I would say too that it is possible to be a waycool eco-warrior without smelling of dead bag lady. I could add that anyone can be a hero on the dole. But that kind of argument is beneath me, so I say nothing.

  In the lobby, I stand now in a shaft of sunlight and bear with good grace the frownings of those who flap past me. So I’m not wearing a lab coat. So have me killed. Tch! These people . . .

  “Michael, Michael, Michael! So sorry to keep you waiting.” Leo’s white coat is appropriately stained and a comical three sizes too small for his long arms. “Come, come, come.”

  Obedient puppy, I follow along the corridors, rising to my toes on the stride to catch glimpses of labs through the high glazing of the corridor walls.

  We come to a door. “NC 1.54 (D) Professor L. Zuckermann.” Leo swipes down a card: a green light glows, a small beep beeps, a lock clunks and the door swings open. I pause at the threshold and mutter unhappily, like Michael Hordern in Where Eagles Dare, “Secu­rity? That word has become a joke round here.” Leo turns in alarm, so I whisper hammily into my lapel, “We’re in! Give us thirty sec­onds and then start the diversion.”

  Leo twigs and I am rewarded with a prim giggle as the overhead strips spank themselves alight. I realize that my childish desire to say something frivolous arises from a watchful tension in Leo, a fear almost, that I find uncomfortable. It comes and goes with him, I decide. In his rooms it was there when he talked to me of my thesis, then it disappeared to be replaced by a joshing geniality. Finally the hunted look returned to his eyes when he ended the interview by inviting me here, to this place.

  I am not sure what I expected. Something. I expected something. After all, why would a man want to give a tour of his laboratory if that laboratory were nothing more than an office?

  A shiny white board without a single formula or string of upside-down Greek characters scrawled upon it. No oscilloscopes, no Van de Graaff generators, no long glass tubes pulsing with purple blooms of ionizing plasma, no deep sinks stained with horrible compounds, no glass-walled containment areas with robotic arms for the transferral of small nuggets of highly radioactive materials from one canister to another, no poster of Einstein poking his tongue out, no warm computer voice to welcome us with an eccentrically programmed personality: “Good morning, Leo. Another shitty day, huh?” Noth­ing, in short, that could not be found in the sales office of your local Toyota dealer. Less in fact, for your local Toyota dealer would at least have a desktop calculator, a computer, a potted plant, an elec­tronic diary, a fax machine, an executive stress reliever and a year planner. No, wait up. There is at least a computer here. A little lap­top, with a mouse trailing from the side. There are too, I concede, shelves of books and magazines and, in place of the year planner, a periodic table.

  Leo marks my disappointment. “This is not a place for what we call the wet sciences, I am afraid.”

  I go up to the periodic table and examine it intelligently, to show some interest.

  “That was left by my predecessor,” Leo says.

  Well there you go.


  I look about me. The remark “So this is where it all goes on then” while honored by convention, would sound rather foolish, so I just nod vigorously as if I approve the smell and tone of the place.

  “If I need equipment there are other rooms where I may book time on the big machines.”

  “Ah. Right. Really then, you’re more a theoretical physicist?”

  “Is there any other kind?” But said sweetly, without impatience.

  He moves to his laptop and opens it up. I see now that this is like no laptop I’ve ever known and I can tell from the trembling of his long fingers that this is an important moment for him. The top section of the device is conventional enough, a rectangular screen. It is the keyboard that takes the eye. There runs a row of square but­tons along the top, where function keys might be, but they have no attributes printed on them. Numbers, letters and ciphers are hand scrawled in yellow Chinagraph under each key. The main body of the casing where the qwerty keys and trackball or pad should be is taken up with small black squares of glass that reflect back the strip light­ing on the ceiling above.

  Underneath the section of bench where this homemade box stands—I suppose it right to use the word bench, since this is, despite all appearances, a laboratory—there is a cupboard. Leo opens the doors to this cupboard and at last I see some proper machinery. Two stately steel cabinets equipped with heavy power switches and, writh­ing all around, as bewildering a tagliatelle of cabling as one could hope for. I note for the first time that there are two wide multicolored connecting ribbons, like old Centronix parallel printing cable, spew­ing from the back of the laptop and down into this cupboard.

  Leo throws the power switch on each cabinet. There is a deep sat­isfying hum as cooling fans begin to play. The black panes of glass on the keyboard now reveal themselves to be LED displays, for a line of green eights lights up and flashes, as on a video recorder whose clock has not been set. Leo bends back his fingers to crack his knuckles as his hands hover above the keyboard. He darts a swift glance to­wards me and presses a sequence of his function keys, a little guiltly, like a shopper who cannot resist playing “Chopsticks” on a depart­ment store synthesizer. One by one, in a sweeping line, the flashing eights compose themselves into stable digits and the screen flowers into life.