by Sam Nash
“Yes. They had us under surveillance the whole time.” Mary observed his head bobbing up and down. He was not convinced. She looked around the room for the least expensive electrical device to demonstrate with. “Okay, do you mind if I use these under cabinet lights?” She pointed to the closest bulb. Hugo shrugged his consent.
With a single finger pressed to the end of the long glass strip, Mary sent a small spark leaping into the contact points connecting the electrical supply. The bulb gleamed. There was a bright flash combined with a startling bang and then nothing but shadow. The entire kitchen was thrown into darkness.
Hugo was startled. A short exhalation puffed out from between his slackened jaw. He scrambled to a high cupboard and flipped the circuit breaker switch on the hidden fuse box. The downlighters and remaining cabinet lamps, bathed them in light.
“Do it again. That one in the corner.” Mary obliged, sending a small shower of sparks onto the Smeg refrigerator. He repeated his fuse box procedure and then returned to her side. “You can generate electromagnetic pulses at will?” It was her turn to nod. “But the ramifications of this are enormous…”
She continued to nod, sucking in her lips to a strangled smile and raising her brows. “Now do you understand?” She waited for the implications to settle in his brain. As he blinked, staring into space, Mary knew that he was calculating every permutation of usage the government could demand of her. “Hugo, you cannot tell anyone about this, promise me.”
Hugo lowered his voice. “On the contrary, Mary. I think everyone should be told about this. If we get your name out there in the virtual world, they won’t be able to touch you.” He rested his bony hand on her shoulder. “We will make you an Internet star.”
“Oh no. No way. You put me online and every whack job and freak will call me out. I have a big enough target painted on my back as it is.” She wagged her index finger at him, berating him as a child. “We just needed a safe place to stay, and I thank you for that, but we will be on our way in the morning.”
“Nonsense. Parth will agree with me. At the very least, let us record evidence of your gift for when you do release it to the scientific community. This is so exciting, Mary. You cannot keep this a secret. Do you know of any others like you? Were you born with this gift?”
Mary stammered, afraid to reveal her brother as her comrade in arms. If only she could deflect his intrusive interest. “Er…no, Parth thinks it began when I was exposed to intense particle discharge during a solar storm. We were on a trip to see the Northern Lights.”
“We? So, there are more like you?” He was not going to let this drop.
Mary crumpled. “Hugo, can we talk about this in the morning? I am exhausted, and I think I should try and get some sleep.”
“Right, yes, of course, but say you will come to Imperial College with me in the morning?” He bounced up from the stool and waited for her answer, holding onto her shoulder and tilting his head to gain eye contact.
It was too easy for her to synchronise with his partially inebriated mind. In her sleep deprived state, she locked on and allowed his sinus rhythm to become hers, and their alpha waves to merge together. In a matter of seconds, she heard his thoughts as clearly as her own. He is using me as a distraction from his breakup with Drew, but there is something else churning in the back of his mind. Mary dug a little deeper, grasping at the unspoken internal dialogue of the befuddled Dane. She saw visions of Hugo standing at a lectern, receiving an award from King Carl Gustaf of Sweden and delivering a speech to delegates in Stockholm. Oh great, another scientific fame junkie, clamouring for a Nobel Prize. I should have known that he would be as competitive as Parth.
Mary untethered his mind and focused on the here and now. Somehow, she felt as though she owed him this kindness. He was there for her in her hour of need. “Are there surveillance cameras at the college? Parth and I cannot be seen.”
Hugo beamed. “We will go to my lab in the morning. I shall make sure you are safe. No one will disturb us. People in my department are very lazy. They never work weekends.” He released his grip and bounced towards the door.
“You can do your tests, Hugo, but no video recording. Got it?”
“I understand. You are shy. What about if we lock the recording away, will you let me then? I will not release it as evidence until you give me permission.” He wrung his hands at her in an exaggerated manner, the alcohol still fuelling his ambition.
“Hmm, we’ll see.”
“Sleep well, my friend. Tomorrow, we will make history.” He flounced out of the kitchen and made his way through the lounge.
Mary switched off the remaining kitchen lights and scanned the lounge. A gigantic television dominated one wall; the sofa and chairs angled for optimal viewing. Another wall contained the central pillar of an enclosed chimney breast, the alcoves either side packed with floor to ceiling shelves that bowed with the weight of hundreds of books. She slipped behind the settee and analysed the spines for titles and author names. Above head height, she found an entire shelf devoted to DK travel guides. Vietnam and Angkor Wat, Hong Kong, Australia, Delhi Agra and Jaipur, Iceland, Morocco and many others besides. Mary marvelled at the extensive collection, mentally ticking off the places that she and Parth had visited from Hugo’s list.
The shelf below carried more earnest prose. Discussions on Kierkegaard and weighty tomes about Socrates and Carl Jung. In amongst the hardback copies of Quantum Field Theory and advanced physics, there were two books with tiny strips of brightly coloured paper marking numerous pages within. The first was entitled, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality. The second was a large black King James Version of The Bible.
Curiosity overpowered respect for privacy. Mary tugged the Bible from its snug home and rested it on the back of the sofa. Carefully slipping her nails between the sheets where the first pink page marker sat, she opened the book to find a passage painted in matching highlighter pen. It read:
Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from your sinful desires, which wage war against your souls. Peter, chapter two, verse eleven.
Mary swept the thin sheets to the next page marker and again, Hugo had highlighted a passage from Corinthians:
We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day – Chapter ten, verse eight.
And another, in Romans, chapter one, verses twenty-five to twenty-seven:
And in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were so consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.
Mary had no need to read the other marked pages. Drew had left Hugo to condemn himself. To battle his religious demons and question his guilt over his unnatural desires.
Chapter Nine
It was raining again. Mary waddled behind the men in an extra-large men’s anorak that she had rolled up at the sleeves. Parth puffed audibly, determined to match Hugo’s strides and energetic pace. Mary fell behind, looking up from the uneven pavement and puddles to see them turn a corner adjoining Queen’s Gate Terrace.
Breaking into a jog, she caught up with the men as they crossed the road and met with a young man waiting on a bicycle outside an Italian restaurant. Hugo unravelled a number of twenty-pound notes from his pocket and exchanged them for a padded envelope with the rider, who then pedalled off down the Gloucester Road.
“Here. These are unregistered pay-as-you-go mobiles. I asked my friend to get ones with some credit already loaded.” Hugo handed them over to Parth. “If you keep calls brief, it should last you.” They thanked him, promising to reimburse his kindness when bank accounts were no longer under scrutiny. They hurried down the tree lined Queen’s Gate to the corner of Prince Consort Road and stopped. “Mary, keep the hood of that coat pulled down over your face. Parth, take the umbrella. That will shield you from the camera outside the build
ing. Wear the cap Mary bought for you inside the foyer.”
Hugo led the way, walking at a brisk pace to the reception area inside. Mary concentrated on the backs of his Converse trainers, holding her head low and scampering after him like an obedient Labrador. Parth donned the peaked cap but could not refrain from twisting his head this way and that, admiring the framed photos of lauded and Nobel winning alumni mounted on the wall.
Professor George Paget Thomson, for the discovery of the diffraction of electrons by crystals, his fine features set in an anxious pose. Professor Baron Patrick Blackett for his discoveries in the fields of nuclear physics and cosmic radiation. Parth paused by the picture to study the Baron’s casual appearance before stepping to the next photo frame. Professor Abdus Salam, for his contribution to the theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions between elementary particles.
“Parth!” Hugo knocked him out of his reflections, sending him darting along after them.
The security guard nodded his recognition to Hugo, who in turn smiled back. Swiping his access card through the scanner at the double doors, Hugo descended two flights of concrete stairs with Parth and Mary close behind. As they entered the room, Mary was struck dumb. The basement lab looked more like a nest for an alien cyborg. Densely packed electrical and mechanical equipment were suspended in metal cabinets, surrounded by curtains of transparent plastic strips to maintain a dust free environment. High voltage danger signs adorned every corner and bench, loaded with buttons and dials. On one side of the lab, a space had been cleared for a cluster of computers, set up on a long workbench.
“Wow…so this is where you spend your days?” Parth slipped off the cap and held the back of his head, taking in the extravagance of equipment before him.
“Mostly, yes, although I have recently been collaborating cross departmentally on analysing surface tension of water in terms of molecular dynamics.” He held out his arm, displaying his cryptic tattoo. “They knew that anything to do with Niels Bohr would persuade me to work with the chemistry department.” Parth lit up; clearly the penny dropped in his brain. Mary heaved a sigh. Their boy’s club mentality was starting to grate.
Parth elucidated. “Niels Bohr worked on the surface tension of water in his early days. He was also famous for postulating a theory regarding energy transfer of electrons, hence Hugo’s tattoo.” He pointed to the inked arm in question. Mary inhaled an irritated breath.
“And he was Danish, like me.” Hugo and Parth chuckled, sending them back to their youthful days at Cambridge.
“It’s funny you mention your work on water. Mary and I have been attempting to build on Benveniste’s theory of water memory. What a coincidence.” A wet curl of hair fell onto his forehead and stuck to his skin.
“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” Hugo stretched out an index finger towards a large blue notice board on the far wall. Three sheets of A4 paper were taped together to create a heading in huge font that read: Quotes War. Multi-coloured sticky notes, scraps of paper and neat printed sheets formed horizontal lines of words, each one in answer to the preceding quote. Mary found Hugo’s statement on the left-hand side of the board.
“Einstein.” She muttered, tracing her finger over the letters HB, scribbled in the corner of the note. Mary tuned out of the Boy’s Club conversation and contemplated the war wall. A glossy poster of a sunset over a lake was superimposed with the words of Niels Bohr. It said: A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself. Next to it, a sticky note quote from Stephen Hawking: If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? The line of quotes continued, each one added bore the initials of the contributor to the battle.
Further down the board she read; God does not play dice with the universe – Einstein (HB). It was immediately followed by; Einstein, stop telling God what to do! – Bohr (LM). And then by; God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen – Hawking (HB).
Mary turned to face Parth and Hugo Blom, who were lost in a frenzy of excitable premises and theories. Their unintelligible scientific shorthand a foreign language and of little interest to her. All at once, she realised the depth of Hugo’s confusion. It was not simply a fear of religious retribution for his sexual preferences but a full on existential crisis. A limitless despair that judgement may await him on multiple planes of multiple universes, governed, not by the incomplete laws of physics, but by a malevolent deity. An invisible force of nature that binds the sub-atomic particles into compounds that form the building materials of life. Mary looked anew at her friend. The creases surrounding his eyes seemed all the more pronounced for her discovery and pity infilled her heart.
“Come with me to another laboratory. It is not wise to test free liquids in here.” They followed Hugo through a preparatory room and another basement lab and into a more forgiving environment. Here they found a room with empty benches and space to contemplate paperwork. Hugo left Parth to set up a tripod and video camera, while he trekked to the Chemistry department for distilled water, a set of chemicals and some glassware.
“Actually, Parth, I’d rather you didn’t video me.” Mary said, using the lull in activities to remove the packaging from their burner phones.
“Don’t be silly. This is the most reliable way to capture experimental protocols.” Parth continued to tighten the wing nuts and position the camcorder.
“I mean it, Parth. Don’t.”
“It’s just an experiment. What could possibly happen?”
“Look what happened at Ditchley, for a start.”
“But that was MI6. This is good old Hugo. We can trust Hugo, honey.”
“How many times do I have to tell you? Stop calling me honey.”
Mary turned away and sent a quick text to her brother. In it, she informed him of their temporary numbers and asked him to call their grandfather and reassure him that all was well. A confirmation message pinged back within moments.
Mary tied her hair up into a ponytail and swapped the anorak for a lab coat that was hanging on a peg by the door. When Hugo returned, they set the camera to record continuously while Mary imprinted three common drugs onto distilled water. Rather than testing the effects on rodents as before, they trudged back to the Chemistry department to make use of their Mass Spectrometer.
Parth held the camera still, as Hugo loaded the labelled phials into the machine. With the camera plugged into the mains, it continued to capture the results from each sample of imprinted water as the Mass Spec completed its analysis. Water sample A appeared on the computer screen as a series of peaks on a graph. Hugo typed in commands, instructing the software to compare the compound against the graph for adrenalin. It matched exactly.
Two further samples complied with their wishes, returning exact matches for the opioid painkiller Codeine and for the antidepressant Fluoxetine or Prozac. Hugo bounced around the spectrometry suite clutching print outs of the tests and vigorously shaking Parth’s hand at the same time. They dashed back to the writing-up room and spread the data sheets out across the benches. The two men congratulated one another, in between formulating plans to design a rigorous testing procedure that would stand up to audits and controls. Parth released the tripod and plugged the camera back into a socket near to Mary. It was still recording.
“We must celebrate.” Hugo bounded out of the lab and returned with three mugs and a bottle of wine from his office. “A student gave it to me for helping with her dissertation. Come, let us drink to our success.”
“Not for me, thank you. But you two go ahead.” Mary looked at the men, patting each other’s backs and boasting of their genius. Had they forgotten what was at stake or did they simply not care?
“Are you feeling unwell? I heard you throwing up this morning.” Parth stopped his reverie for a second, the Hippocratic Oath nudging at his compassion. Mary flushed in panic. She wasn’t ready to tell him about the baby. She wasn’t even sure whether it had a future in this world yet. This
was her secret until she decided otherwise. Pulling herself together she affected a calm air.
“I think the stress and lack of sleep has taken its toll. I’ll be okay in a couple of days.” She stared him down, her neutral face against his suspicious frown. He made a harrumphing noise but backed off, turning to retrieve his mug of wine.
Keen to put some distance between Parth and her burgeoning womb, she said, “Hugo, where are the toilets?” Mary followed the directions Hugo had given, taking her up the stairs and past an administration office. Outside the office hatch an electronic notice board scrolled the news feed from the BBC. The FTSE 100 had fallen sharply, with shares plummeting primarily in the pharmaceutical companies. Her burner phone rang. It was Dan.
“Hey Mary, is this a bad time?”
“No, why?” She sat down on the deserted steps, squeezing her pelvic floor muscles against her need to urinate.
“Connie wants a quick word. Hope you don’t mind me telling her that you are in bother again. She won’t publish anything unless you give her permission to do so.”
Mary sighed. “No Dan. That’s okay. Put her on.” She shook her head. This was expanding out to all the people she cared about the most. If only she could go back and put a lid on her abilities, find a way to eradicate them from her life. She could hear Dan’s muffled instructions. He had put his hand over the mouthpiece of the receiver and his shirt buttons were clacking against the phone casing.
“Salut, Mary. Dan told of my story investigating those directors of large companies who work in government, oui?” The line clicked. It was soft, but Mary heard it. Of course. How could she be so stupid? If the minister cannot track her phone, they would put a tap on her brother’s. She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead.
“Hi, Connie. Yes, Dan did mention something of the sort. Why? Has something happened?” How could she time how long they had been on the phone? She wore no watch and her smart phone was back in the lab. Had it been more than thirty seconds? She stood up and spun around, looking up at the electronic notice board, noting the seconds tick away before her. Could MI6 track their position from this call?