The Fourth Kind of Time

by Tim Neilson

  The building where Anna was working predated mass glass manufacturing, and by modern standards had comparatively few windows, and those it did have were narrow. Yet the radiance of the sunshine was such that, by positioning her chair strategically, Anna could work without needing artificial light. Occasionally a footstep reverberated from bare floorboards, but mostly the floor was covered by carpet, which did a reasonable job of muffling the footfalls. It would have done an even better job if it hadn’t been rather threadbare, thought Anna. She assumed that, despite the magnificence of Cambridge’s buildings, budgetary pressures must cause the same sort of skimping on non-essentials at Cambridge as they did elsewhere. Or perhaps it was because of the magnificence of the buildings. She remembered Daniel telling her back in Melbourne how Ormond and the other older colleges on the Crescent sometimes had to spend large sums restoring the stonework of their original buildings. It might be orders of magnitude more expensive to maintain the old buildings here, she thought, with so many more ancient sandstone structures, and most of those being centuries older than the ones at Melbourne.

  Get on with it, she instructed herself and focused her attention once again on the folios in front of her …

  Bingo, she thought with intense satisfaction. A reference to ‘Crick’s atomic work’. She continued reading avidly, but soon paused, disconcerted. She began rifling through the other papers in the bundles on the table. Forcing herself to be methodical she checked and re-checked each document. But what she wanted wasn’t there. What she did find was very much not what she had wanted. She sat staring vacantly ahead, slumped, unusually for her, in a posture of despondence.

  At that same moment, someone else was feeling despondent. Tina roamed aimlessly, deriving no pleasure from the gentle warmth and illumination of the summer sun, nor from the grandeur of the buildings around her, nor from the cheerful bustle of the streets. She thought back to the times when James was in a scrape and her intervention had saved the situation. How could he be so ungrateful as to start hanging around with that pen-pushing, paper-shuffling Claudia who, Tina was sure, wouldn’t be able to block a punch to save her own life. Tina knew that she was younger, taller and more athletic than Claudia. I’m better looking too, she told herself with belligerent assertiveness. What does James see in her? She pictured the two of them at that first meeting, the morning that they had arrived at the hotel, talking to each other. Talking. Yes, that must be it. All that intellectual stuff that James and Daniel are always going on with, and even Anna joins in sometimes.

  That made sense in a way. Maybe, Tina thought hopefully, that’s all it is. Maybe he’s just talking with her the way he would with Daniel if Daniel had been with him. But she had to admit to herself that she was just engaging in wishful thinking. Dinner dates, walks around the local sights, just the two of them, even though Tina herself and Anna were in town as well, wouldn’t be happening if Claudia was just a substitute for Daniel.

  Perhaps that mental matching was a catalyst for James experiencing another, more primal, kind of attraction. Worse still, she feared that it might be essential for James to become more than casual friends with someone. Tina knew if that were so, she would never be able to compete. Abstract thinking was a field into which Tina would never be able to venture with the assured competence of someone like Claudia. She wished that she could think of some passion in James’s life that she could share, in the way that martial arts had been the starting point for her and Alex.

  Alex! She hadn’t even thought about him since they had arrived in Cambridge. She wasn’t sure, in fact, whether she had thought of him at all since leaving Australia. She felt a spasm of intense guilt and reached for her phone in order to send an abjectly apologetic text.

  But then she paused. Alex hadn’t made any attempt to contact her. Oh, that’s just him, she thought, still sulking till I call him and apologise for coming on this trip. But then she recalled that there had been similar incidents during her relationship with Alex. Each one had been trivial in itself but they formed a pattern. And the overwhelmingly dominant motif of that pattern was Alex objecting to Tina’s wishes and Tina giving in to his. In the past she had tended to repress, without being aware that she was doing so, any value judgements about such occurrences. If she’d thought about any of those incidents, she would have been forced to consciously choose between being subservient to him or having an argument where he would refuse to compromise. No doubt the self-censorship of her thoughts had been caused by a subconscious reluctance to face such a choice.

  The geographical distance and a few days without contact had allowed her the space to mentally evaluate their relationship. Or perhaps it was the turmoil of her feelings about James and Claudia that gave her a deep-seated need for the emotional satisfaction of anger with Alex as a scapegoat. Whatever the cause, she was in no mood to sweep the issue under the carpet. Quite the contrary. The memories she had of him were about none of the happier occasions, which would have reminded her of all the reasons that she had started going out with Alex in the first place. Her mood had no place in it for recollections of shared exhilarations and joyous companionship, or the fun of challenging physical endeavours and their contentment at having accomplished them. She wallowed in resentment about all those aspects of his character, and the actions stemming from them, that hitherto she would have avoided even thinking about. If she suggested eating Thai, he’d always want to eat Japanese. If she wanted to see a band, there was some objection to that band, or that night, or that venue. It was always out of the question.

  She asked herself whether on those occasions he always genuinely did have a preference contrary to hers. Or did he need to exert control over her, by maintaining a routine of forcing her to obey him, whether or not that meant pushing for something that wasn’t even his first choice?

  Tina wondered whether if, early in their relationship, she’d said ‘no’ a few times, things would have been different. No, she decided, Alex would have just escalated every situation to World War III level. Tina had to admit to herself, in the early flush of a new relationship and not wishing to jeopardise things, she would have caved in. But why did she tolerate it? She wouldn’t have to if she were going out with someone more considerate. James would never behave like that towards her. If she and James … yes, that was the answer. Simple. Problem solved. Dump Alex and then she and James would … and that brought her back around to contemplating what was going on between James and Claudia. She experienced in rapid succession a surge of anger at Claudia, a surge of anger at Alex, and a generalised writhing sense of how unfair everything was.

  Suddenly aware of her surroundings, she checked the time and realised she needed to join Anna and James for lunch soon. Tina had an excellent recollection for places and an equally excellent sense of direction, and she knew from the sight of the dark brick of Magdalene College that she was some distance from Pembroke. She began striding towards the centre of town, while her thoughts reverted to her unsatisfactory situation.

  Why didn’t I think of all of this ages ago, before we came here and James met Claudia? Tina asked herself. When she first met James, she sensed he found her attractive. She’d toyed with the idea of trying to take up with him. In hindsight, she realised that even then things had been unsatisfactory with Alex. With miserable insight, she remembered she’d decided not to chase James. At the time, she knew it would be too much to expect James to pick up on any subtle hints. He knew she was in a relationship and it wasn’t in his nature to destroy someone else’s life choices. She had elected not to break off with Alex and to stay away from James. Uncharacteristically, Tina had taken the conservative option and was now bitterly regretting it.

  Why, she asked herself, didn’t I make a move when I could have? At the time she hadn’t felt compelled by her emotions to act. In a rare venture into introspection, she realised her initial reaction to James had been very different from her first contact with any other man where she’d gone on to form a relationship.


  Tina’s romantic entanglements followed a consistent pattern. First there was a strongly felt physical impulse. Then her habitual recklessness allowed that impulse to drive her without any moderating influence, such as rational thought, being brought to bear. Then there was a period of apparent fulfilment, which gradually morphed into dissatisfaction and disillusionment. Finally, there came escape, accompanied by a sense of relief that outweighed any residual feelings of regret. But with James that first contact had been different.

  Almost automatically she turned into the ancient stone passageway leading to Pembroke’s grounds, pondering whether a relationship that hadn’t begun with a visceral surge could possibly be better than the ones that had, or whether it would be destined to fail even more miserably. As she passed the porter’s office and approached the lawns she saw Anna. Perhaps, she thought, some sisterly advice might make things clearer.

  “Anna, when you and Daniel first …” she began, before hesitating.

  Anna looked at her in puzzlement, then waved a dismissive hand, as she saw two figures emerging through a doorway at the bottom of some stairs to the south of the lawn.

  “Later,” she said. “Here come James and Claudia.”

  “Hello,” Claudia greeted them both brightly.

  “Hello,” responded Anna warmly.

  “Hello,” answered Tina in a flat neutral tone. For a fraction of a second Claudia’s expression betrayed an awareness of the difference between the two sisters’ reactions, and perhaps of Anna’s perturbed glance. However, her habit of disciplined politeness took control, a façade of untroubled friendliness quickly masking her real thoughts.

  “I wonder where Cam is?” she continued pleasantly, “Oh, there he is now”. In accordance with their agreed plan, they headed into the dining hall without waiting for Cam, and greeted him only inside, as if it were by coincidence that he happened to seat himself for lunch next to Claudia and her guests.

  Tina had been inside the dining hall at Ormond with Daniel and Anna. The hall at Pembroke was similar in layout, with long tables flanking a central aisle that ran between the main doors at one end to the ‘high table’ at right angles to the aisle at the other. Tina guessed the two halls were of similar size, but Pembroke had a lower ceiling and much darker timbers complementing the stonework. Pembroke was much older than any of the colleges at Melbourne, and it certainly looked like it. Many of the portraits on the wall were consistent with that impression.

  Her train of thought was interrupted by a sense that something had unsettled the others. What had happened? The others had suddenly fallen silent. Why? Did Anna just announce some bad news?

  “I found some papers that referred to what Crick was doing in 1959,” Anna continued.

  “Yes?” Cam interrupted, half eager, half in trepidation.

  “And,” Anna resumed, “it doesn’t look like he was thinking about time-travelling particles.”

  “How could you tell?” Cam demanded, unable to keep a note of protest out of his voice at this threat to his dream.

  “He seems to have been focusing on unstable isotopes purely from the angle of mass statistical behaviour,” Anna explained. “He knew that a molecule with unstable isotopes in it might interact with other molecules in less predictable ways than one with only stable isotopes. But he seems to have been thinking only that the less predictable reactions would produce, by simple probability, a wider range of outcomes than the more predictable ones, so the unpredictable outcomes were more likely to include something that worked biochemically.”

  “Well that’s a good start,” Cam couldn’t help but interject.

  “Yes, but he knew there were two big problems.

  “First, even if it did work, it wouldn’t work well enough to cure anything unless there were so many unstable, working, molecules that enough of them could react in a useful way to create an effective clinical dosage. And of course, if the effective reaction was only one of a wide range of reactions that were occurring – which was the theory he was working on – you’d need a massively increased total dosage because a lot, probably most, of the molecules would be doing something different and useless.

  “Second, even if it worked it could well be next to useless, scientifically, because there probably wouldn’t be any way of telling which was the interaction that actually worked, and which ones hadn’t – and if you didn’t know what had worked you could never progress to finding out how to manufacture something that would reliably produce the result you wanted. You’d just never have the data to differentiate.

  “And,” she concluded, “that’s where all the papers I’ve seen leave it. It doesn’t look like he got as far as any solution at all, let alone the one we wanted him to reach.”

  Cam nodded glumly.

  “Of course,” Anna added, “you should look at them yourself to see if I’ve missed something. Here are the references,” she said, handing Cam a piece of paper.

  “Thanks,” responded Cam, pocketing the paper listlessly without glancing at it. He looked at the assembled faces and pulled himself together. “No. Thanks. I really mean it. Thanks for coming over and trying. It’s not your fault that there isn’t anything there.”

  “We don’t know that for certain,” James retorted stubbornly. “Anna, was the stuff you saw from a time after Crick had heard from Burnet? Did it say that Crick had given up?”

  “It didn’t say anything about either of those things,” Anna admitted. “Oh, have you heard back from the Champ? It was just an idea,” she added in response to Cam’s enquiring glance. “We thought we’d check whether Asimov had published any story where someone used time travel to solve a problem. If he did, then maybe Burnet was actually encouraging Crick, in which case we should check for any papers after 1959 that might show Crick kept going.”

  “I haven’t heard from him yet, so let’s still park that for the moment. We’ve still got a few places here to look through,” James informed Cam, “and we haven’t even started in London yet.”

  “If I were you, I’d give it away and start having a holiday,” Cam advised.

  “We’ve come all this way. I’m not going back to Australia wondering whether we would have succeeded if we’d finished the job,” James insisted. “Anna?”

  “Agreed,” Anna affirmed.

  Cam smiled. “Have it your way then. So we live in hope for a while longer. Good luck. And I mean that most sincerely.”

  From that point on, lunchtime conversation turned to lighter more social matters, until it was time for the two Cambridge-based academics to return to their routine tasks, and for James and Anna to get back to their investigations.

  As they emerged into the sunlight Anna lightly pulled on Tina’s sleeve to slow her down and allow the others to move slightly ahead.

  “What’s got into you?” Anna demanded, quietly, but forcefully and accusingly. “You weren’t too bad with the rest of us, but if I’d been Claudia, I would have slapped your face. Well?”, she demanded, when Tina showed no sign of responding.

  “Sorry,” mumbled Tina eventually.

  Anna’s glare softened. She thought she could guess why Tina seemed prone to sullen despondency. In her sympathy for her sister, the question of why Claudia should bear the brunt of that mood slipped her mind.

  “I know it must have been very boring for you,” she said kindly. “But I did warn you,” she couldn’t help adding. “Anyway,” she went on, seeking to reassure her younger sibling, “there’s probably only this afternoon’s work for us here, maybe a little bit more tomorrow morning, then a day or two in London, and after that we’ll have plenty of time to do some things with you. You only have to get through another day or two of boredom, then we’ll start to have fun.”

  Tina did her best to look grateful. Anna smiled at her indulgently, and then headed off to plough through whatever awaited her at the last couple of places on her list. Tina stared pensively at her, and then drifted slowly out of the Pembroke grounds and back into the streets.<
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  Chapter 11

  Predators and Prey

  The early start was no hardship, given that it was near midsummer and the sun had risen some hours ago. The previous afternoon Anna and James had completed their examination of any Cambridge archives of material that might have related to Francis Crick’s work in or before 1959, and were preparing for a full day of work in London. They walked towards the railway station in the midst of a gaggle of other pedestrians, also apparently intent on travelling to the city.

  Before leaving Australia, James had contacted the four places in London they wished to visit and had arranged for permission to fossick there; Anna had done likewise. Thus, having both secured all relevant rights of entry, they could split the enquiries however they liked. Anna proposed to start at the British Library, the repository of so much of the United Kingdom’s written archives. James would first visit Crick’s old alma mater, University College London, which took immense pride in its connection with the great man and would certainly have retained whatever records it had ever received about him. Both those institutions were very close to King’s Cross Station, so starting there made sense.

  How quickly each of them progressed at those two institutions would dictate which of them tackled the remaining two. One of those was the Francis Crick Centre, also close to King’s Cross, and a very modern research centre possibly holding something of interest in its collection of Crick memorabilia. Last, there was the former site of a medical research organisation called the Lister Institute. The old Lister building was the least promising venue, only on their agenda because it happened to be in London. It had no association with Crick that they were aware, it was some distance from the other three, and although Burnet had worked there for some time, he had departed for Australia long before 1959 when the events they were interested in had occurred. Also, whatever records the Lister Institute retained had previously been examined by Cam and found to be useless. All they hoped for was in the late 1950s Burnet may still have corresponded with former colleagues there and mentioned something that could give them a clue, and the relevant papers had never been cleared out of the old site.