by Henry Gee
Chapter 5. Candidate
Cambridge, England, Earth, June, 2023
Now, what I want is, Facts.
Charles Dickens—Hard Times
Jack Corstorphine needed help. Just how badly he was reluctant to admit even to himself. He knew only too well how a blow to one’s self confidence in the final stages of a research degree could destroy everything.
He’d seen for himself, so many times, how research students started with so much ebullience, only to find, more than two years later and within sight of the dreadful midnight watch they called ‘writing-up,’ that what they had accumulated actually amounted to very little. Drifts of data accumulated with great pain over years vanished like April snow in the first light of critical analysis. Even worse, doctoral candidates, ploughing furrows long and alone, might wake up and realize that they had spent those years asking the wrong questions to begin with; that however good the data they had gathered, there was, in sum, no case to be answered. Or, worse still, that they had, in technical language and with much circumlocution, done something that had been worked out already, but in some other way.
Or, worst of all, that they had simply proved, with certainty and without fear of contradiction, that x equals x.
Department of the Bleeding Obvious.
So much time wasted. And more than wasted. Those self-abasing, self-denying years of energy and youth irretrievable, when careers are built, and they might, like their school friends, already have steady jobs in industry or in the City, with mortgages and some status in life. With partners and families, rather than living like overgrown students in drabness and in debt.
Jack tried to console himself that his problems were not yet terminal, for he could make out patterns in his data—this, the most exciting sensation a scientist can experience. He was simply at a loss to understand how they could be organized.
As a result of his long pilgrimages, he could view a landscape and immediately sense that people had been there, long ago. Jack had gone far beyond looking for traces of buried roads, post-holes, cave hearths and flint debitage. More than anyone alive, he could look at the angle of a hill-slope, or the way a river curved in its course, and tell that these things had been shaped by the hand of man, even without any other sign, and even accounting for the titanic forces of climate change that had shaped Britain over the past million years, in which glaciers had come and gone, scrubbing entire ranges of hills from the map and altering the courses of rivers over their whole lengths.
His talent had become so internalized that he could no longer look dispassionately at its products—and that was the nub and heart and whole of the problem. That these things were so he had no doubt—but he had no way of demonstrating, objectively, that the subtle clues he saw were not made by natural forces, unaided. And he’d look a right idiot if his thesis committee asked precisely how he knew that, say, the layout of the caves in Cheddar Gorge could not possibly have been natural, and he’d had no answer ready, save that they just looked like that, because he said so. He’d be laughed off as surely as if he’d said he’d discovered Atlantis.
What he needed was some formal way of comparing his intuitions of ancient human presence in one place, with those inspired by somewhere else, and then contrasting both of these with what nature would have created, unaided. He needed a system that would corral the patterns thrown up by his gut reaction, to domesticate them, to force them to make sense. But quantifying his intuitions? How do you quantify a river-bend, or the feeling that a hilltop should be here, rather than somewhere else? You might as well try to lasso the clouds. Despite much research and earnest questions of statisticians, no ready method existed—it was all too vague. He had neither the means nor (he admitted to himself, ruefully) the ability to derive such a technique himself.
Yet without such a key he could go no further. In his mind, he could see his thesis: he was so desperate that he could almost taste his thesis, but a barrier at once so intangible and yet so impassable stood between him and completion.
And then there was Jadis. She had just completed her finals (a starred first, naturally) and stayed on in Cambridge to help him out. When he asked her if she had a home to go to she was strangely vague. If pressed, she’d say that she loved him. If pressed further she’d only say that she was busily looking for a home for the both of them, burying her nose into the property-for-rent pages of the local paper and changing the subject.
“You know, Jack, you silly man, you work too hard. Fancy a holiday?” she’d say with apparent artlessness. A holiday? Now?
“Yes. In the mountains. I know you like mountains.” Her black eyes shone with mischief under the curtain of her hair.
“Mountains?”
“Precisely. Mountains. I know I’ll never get you to lie on a beach. Not in the state you’re in. And you’ve been looking at the same old mountains for so long you might as well look at some different ones.”
Reluctantly, Jack had to agree. He’d been working so hard and so long that perhaps he needed a break, a chance to refocus. He thought—no, he desperately hoped—that inspiration might strike if he took his mind off things a little.
“Let’s go to France,” he said, brightening. “Look at the Alps, or the Pyrenees. We could drive there in the Field Vehicle.” Jadis smiled and threw her arms around him. They were both thinking of Jack’s battered Peugeot 205, crammed with camping gear, in which he’d clocked up so many miles. “I knew I could talk you round,” she said, “but I never dreamed you’d be such a pushover.”
At least he’d be doing something, rather than just sitting here in a funk, boxed in.
