Shortcuts

by Grant Stone

  And yet there he’d been, after hours, breaking his own rule. It wasn’t acceptable. How could the young men and women at the Cavendish take his strictures seriously if he couldn’t do the same? Ernest couldn’t understand why he’d stayed so long. He supposed he must have wandered off, somehow, into the atom paths and byways of his brain, lost track of time. Yes, that was it.

  His knee had stiffened under him, and he had felt the ache deep within the joint as he moved to the door, felt the handle in his palm. And then it had changed under his palm – that plain, sturdy door handle had changed to something as plain and as sturdy, but different. Ernest had looked down and seen the workroom door, seen the Den door, and when he turned around to see if the changes had come up behind him as well as in front, as well as in flesh – there were imprints in his palm, one layered over the other where he had clenched down out of shock – there were two laboratories in front of him.

  They seemed to occupy the same space, and all the matter was translucent. He could see through a pump to a desk, and through that desk to a wall that shimmered with brick, with plaster. For one heady, horrifying moment Ernest wasn’t sure which of them was the ghost – whether he was waking up from a dream of Cavendish to the reality of a young man, whether he had never left New Zealand, never left the Den.

  There were the same old gowns and cloaks, the same poor light, the same dampness in the air and walls. There, too, were the old batteries that had been the bane of his existence as a student – the same smell of acid, the same irritation. And it was all so real. It wasn’t just the hallucinations, the spectres of old shapes. He could taste the musty atmosphere when he breathed in, and the acid stung his nose.

  And overlapping the Den was the Cavendish workroom, the new transformer. Ernest could see the difference in the floor – they’d had to reinforce it so it could take the weight. There was a vacuum pump and an accelerator tube. There were metal shields and large glass bulbs – the rectifier bulbs – and though their glass was smooth and clear, all that Ernest could see behind them was the equipment of another time. Even his watch flickered back and forth, from the cheap plain one he’d had to the newer, more expensive model.

  He was backing away, backing towards that two-handled laboratory door when the Den began to flood. There was no clanking, broken pipe, no susurrus sound of water. Instead it filled in silence – filled rapidly, as the water first spread across the floor to puddle around his shoes and rose with his breath to his ankles, spilling through the cellar.

  Ernest would have lurched forward, even with his bad knee, if the water was affecting the transformer, the electrics of the new workshop, but though the water was rising now to the level of the desk in the Den, his old papers floating up off the rough surface, there was no reflection in the rectifier bulbs, no disturbance in the Cavendish lab – no sparks, and no damage.

  Then, too, was the smell. More than the battery acid of his early years, Ernest recognised the smell of salt. It was salt water rising through the Den now, rising above his waist, ocean-green even in the half-light of early evening. Ernest fumbled with the door then, with the handle wet and slippery in his hand, the drag of wet cloth on his sleeves, and he wrenched the door open and stumbled out of the workroom, stumbled into a hallway where his watch solidified on his wrist and his clothes were dry.

  When he opened the door back to the room, opened it in a small strip to peek through, the workroom was as it should be: stable, absent of swelling and unencumbered with history. Ernest blinked, rubbed at his eyes with the rough material of his jacket, and he had himself almost convinced it was a funny turn, a dream of memory, until he checked the new transformer and found in the odd corners and creases of its carcass the faint, lacy tracings of salt after evaporation.

  TASMAN SEA, 1895

  Letters of introduction were kept safely in his cabin, tucked in with the radio wave detector he’d worked on and demonstrated at Canterbury, all packed up in a box, and all he could think of was the opportunity for presenting them. Ern stood at the railings until the last of the coast was out of sight. He didn’t know when he’d see New Zealand again, when next he’d see his family, or Mary, but he didn’t feel yet the sadness he thought he would. There was too much excitement to be sad.

  He’d got the Exhibition scholarship, the one that would allow him to go to study in England, to leave Christchurch for, he hoped, the Cavendish. It still wasn’t quite enough to live on, but George had lent him money enough to escape the orbit of provincial laboratories. ‘Let’s face it,’ George had said, ‘you’re the bright one of the family, Ern. You can’t miss this.’ And he’d pressed the money on him – not a fortune, for George didn’t have a fortune, but as much as he could spare and it was enough, barely. Ern would have felt worse about taking it if George weren’t his elder, if he didn’t see in his brother’s face the desire to help at least one of his little brothers, when there were two of those young ones he hadn’t been able to help.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ern had said. ‘George, thank you.’

  ‘You’re good for it,’ George replied, gripping Ern’s right hand with both his own. ‘I know you’ll make us proud.’

  ‘It’s a great chance for you,’ his father had said, and Ern had laughed and agreed, had swung his little sisters round and talked of science to his mother so she wouldn’t speak of shipping. She was leery now of boats.

  ‘Of course it’s not the same,’ she had said, on his last day, straightening his collar like she had when he was small. ‘It’s a big strong vessel you’re going in.’ Nothing like the little boat that had failed his brothers, failed them in local waters while Ern was heading off to far deeper seas, far stronger tides and the potential for ocean waves. ‘But you be careful. I don’t want to hear of any accidents because you’ve had some silly ideas.’

  ‘He’s going to climb the rigging,’ said one of his little sisters, giggling. ‘He’s going to climb it all the way to the top.’

  ‘He is not,’ said Martha, severely. ‘Are you, Ernest?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said, because that was an easy enough promise to make if it took the shadows from her eyes, if it resigned her to his going and the manner of it. And now she was out of sight – not just her but the country of his birth, the kōwhai and kauri and miro, the colour of the bush against the sea.

  He thought he might wish for it, one day, but for now the horizon was clear and the wind was on his face and Ern left his place at the stern and ran to the front, to find a place to look ahead. His feet echoed on the deck, and for a moment it sounded as if there were others running with him. He could have sworn that there were. It wasn’t just the footsteps. He stood at the railings, his eyes closed and face tilted up, the sun on his skin and he could feel them either side, his fellow travellers. They would be just as excited as he was, no doubt, some of them leaving their new country for the first time. Like him, they were sailing over the world to where the stars were different, where the Southern Cross was just a memory, and imprinted before all other constellations.

  ‘This is going to be the most wonderful voyage,’ said Ern, hoping to make friends, but when he opened his eyes he was alone at the railing. ‘Well, don’t you look a right idiot, talking to yourself,’ he said, but he laughed as he said it. He was too giddy to feel embarrassed, too drunk on opportunity and ozone to be anything but happy. Ern turned against the railing, leaning back against it to look down the length of the ship – at the vessel itself, at the sailors and the other passengers. Some of the last looked a little green, and Ern felt for them. He’d had a touch of seasickness himself, but even a short time on board had taught him that fresh air got rid of the worst of it, so he spent much of his time on deck. There was too much going on to bother with seasickness.

  There was someone beside him, then, and Ern knew it for more than fancy because a shadow fell across his face, blocking out the sun. He shivered a little – it was still winter, and he was in his coat even on the sunniest of days – and beneath his
elbows the railings were unaccountably cold, as if ice had been run across the iron. He could feel the sudden chill even through his jacket.

  The woman next to him seemed strangely familiar. She didn’t look very much older than him and there was something in her face that reminded him of his sisters, though her hair was innocent of pig-tails. His mother would never let one of her daughters out like this, though – in a too-fine dress, a pretty bright blue for all that it was completely unsuitable, unserviceable for shipboard life. It was a colour he’d seen before, once on a Marlborough beach and in Christchurch too, at the university.

  The woman next to him now, the one in the extraordinary dress, wore no hat. Granted it was a winter sun, but with skin as pale as hers, Ern judged she’d be in for a nasty burn if she weren’t careful.

  ‘Are you off to London too?’ he said, but the girl never answered him, only stared at him from a distance just out of reach, and there was in her colour and stance something that reminded him of... of...

  Ern couldn’t place it, but before he could enquire further a small girl ran past him, spinning a hoop and giggling, her parents keeping a careful eye from further up the deck. Ern grinned at the child and she grinned back and he heard her little feet on the deck and there was that echo again, as if there were others with her, other little feet running and skipping after the hoop and when he turned back to the young lady she was gone.

  CAMBRIDGE, 1930

  He had become a man with grandchildren. He was afraid he was going to become a man with only grandchildren.

  Ernest sat with his feet together, with his back straight and his hands clasped tight so that they didn’t show the shaking. It was no use trying to keep busy through the wait – as distracted as he was, his hands would be clumsy at experiments. Clumsiness meant contamination and temper, poor results. He had little stomach for it, for the potential glass-breaking, the shattering of instruments. Little stomach too for salt water, for the rising tides of basins and bad pipes, the nausea that came with thoughts of drowning. The water of the Sounds, the water of his home, stank of death to him now.

  Ernest suspected he was about to become all too familiar with death, familiar in a visceral, gut-deep and wrenching way that had little to do with shadows and all too much with the silence of pianos, with empty beaches and broken promises. After Herbert, after Charles, he’d never heard his mother play again. The piano had remained, polished still and the wood warm in the afternoon sun as it shone through the windows; but all the joy in playing had gone out of her, and none of Martha’s children had kept her knack.

  She’d tried to teach them, to teach all of them. Ernest remembered sitting on the bench beside her when his legs were still too short to touch the ground, to reach the pedals. He remembered his mother’s hands on his own as she taught him the keys, how hard it was to get his fingers to cooperate. How he’d learned the knack eventually – quick enough, for he’d been a bright lad, but his preference had never been for music, for the long hours of practice. His practice, his patience, was reserved for radiation, for laboratories and experiments and science. Music lessons were marking time, a pleasant diversion, and his fingers had never developed fluidity in timing and notes. He’d never been the musician his mother was. None of them had been, really, though she’d tried with all her children, the sons and daughters both – until two of the sons were gone and took her music with them for drowning.

  He wondered if she would have taken it up again for Eileen, if they hadn’t lived half a world apart, if he’d raised his daughter in southern waters, with the red beeches and the wood pigeons and the bright terrible blue of the Sounds, the way the water wrapped around. Perhaps she would have sat the little girl beside her and picked out the keys, would have made a reconciliation with them that way, but his daughter had been brought up far from her grandmother and her catalytic potential had been undermined by distance.

  Now, it seemed likely that it would be undermined by something else entirely, by a labour gone bad, an unlucky and unmusical thing. Still, if he closed his eyes Ernest could hear, perhaps, what his daughter would have sounded like had those early lessons been a reality, had the relationship between generations not been divided by continents and the oceans between. And there it was, at the edge of hearing: the picking of notes, the awkward, ungainly keys, the timing all wrong, the pressure unreliable. Some notes were louder than they should have been, some a bare presence that was repeated as the key was pressed harder, was slammed down on, and the scales were mutilated things, rough as if they’d had chunks bitten out, as if elastic held the notes together and was fraying round the edges.

  The notes were nostalgia, and they echoed. Ernest could hear them now with his eyes open, with the plain wall before him and the hard seat beneath. It was almost as if they were in the room with him, as if he could turn his head and they’d be there, their shadows on the wall, on bookshelves stuffed with back issues of Physikalische Zeitschrift and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. And Ernest would have resisted the impulse, would have kept his posture straight and his eyes forward, if that clumsy thumping hadn’t degraded, suddenly, into the terrible (and terribly deliberate) scale that Charles had always defaulted to when revolting at practise and piano, before he’d given up scales for sea water. He’d done it for attention, always, to underline where he’d rather be, that he’d had enough, and at the repeat of it, so many years later, Ernest couldn’t help but look, couldn’t help but hope.

  There was nothing. No shadows, no piano. No reminders of a life long gone, for as soon as Ernest moved from rigidity the music stopped and the room was silent.

  ‘Charles?’ said Ernest. ‘Lad, are you there?’ His big farmer hands clenched in on each other, his fingertips whitening under pressure. ‘Charlie?’

  He’d changed his mind, then. He could have done with footprints after all, with salt water and the evidence of seas long gone, the under-scent of rot. Perhaps if puddles waited by him, if he could look down at the hard floor and see prints either side of him, feel presence rather than absence, there’d be something of comfort in it. Something to say that loss was not a complete thing, that it was something more than catalyst, a way of untangling the universe and drawing meaning from it.

  But there was nothing. No salt or sand or colour, no notes and no disturbance. An absence instead of presence, and when Ernest heard the knock upon his door, he knew they had come to tell him that his daughter was dead.

  IT IS CLEAR IN THIS case that on the whole the energy derived from transmutation of the atom is small compared with the energy of the bombarding particles. There thus seems to be little prospect that we can hope to obtain a new source of power by these processes. It has sometimes been suggested, from analogy with ordinary explosives, that the transmutation of one atom might cause the transmutation of a neighbouring nucleus, so that the explosion would spread throughout all the material. If this were true, we should long ago have had a gigantic explosion in our laboratories with no one remaining to tell the tale. The absence of these accidents indicates, as we should expect, that the explosion is confined to the individual nucleus and does not spread to the neighbouring nuclei, which may be regarded as relatively far removed from the centre of the explosion. (Ernest Rutherford, ‘The Transmutation of the Atom,’ 1933.)

  HAVELOCK, 1867

  ‘You have to remember to trust your gut, Ern,’ said James. ‘To go with your instincts.’

  And Ern, watching his father, could only think That hasn’t worked out so well for you, has it? His father’s instincts had led him to walk the Sounds for month after hopeless month, for a year, because he believed that if he just walked enough, looked enough, then he’d find the bodies of the children that had been lost. Perhaps that was instinct – or perhaps it was just the desire to get out of the house, to put distance between himself and his grief and the grief of his wife. The way the latter came with silence, the way it came with the shutting up of instruments and the cessation of piano notes.<
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  But no. Ern couldn’t believe that. His father was not such a coward, and if he found comfort in solitude sometimes then it was no more than anyone else did – his mother and brothers and sisters, Ern himself. No. It was instinct that caused that endless, painful search ... the deep gut feeling that hard work and hard love would pay off.

  Ern wasn’t so very old himself. Not a man yet, not truly, but close – and even he could see that his father’s instinct was a lie. He could see it but he couldn’t say it. That would be cruelty, and there was only so much cruelty he could fit into his mouth, a hard, stony truth-telling that his father would not, could not appreciate. Instead, he bit his tongue until the blood came, until he tasted iron. Iron was kindness, perhaps – or the magnetised needle within a compass. He couldn’t tell anymore. The emotional swamp of his parents’ loss was too much for him, the waters turbulent and the currents over-murky. Ern had gone past wishing for music, but he would have done almost anything now for mathematics, for physics and science and certainty – or at least an uncertainty that he had a hope to solve.

  ‘You don’t believe me,’ said James.

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Ern replied. ‘I didn’t say anything.’

  James sighed. It was a sound his son had heard too often. ‘I know it’s not your way,’ he said. ‘I don’t have your gifts, Ern. I don’t see things the way that you do.’