Chapter Fourteen
DYER COULD TELL – YOU ONLY had to look at him – that Marvar had exhausted himself swatting away the images. There were nights in Belém when the bats zinged back and forth in front of your face, as if someone was shooting them. That was how Marvar held up his hands. It was going round and round in his head, what might have happened, what he could do.
‘Have you spoken to anyone?’ Dyer said finally. Here, on Port Meadow, beside the Thames, the whole thing seemed melodramatic, extreme. So implausible.
‘No … I can’t tell Samir.’ He had had to keep his excitement and then his dread from his son.
‘A doctor, perhaps,’ although Dyer did not mean this in the way that it sounded to Marvar, who looked bewildered and exposed.
‘You don’t believe me …’
‘I didn’t say that –’
‘I’m not delusional,’ his face haggard.
Dyer replied in the controlled, neutral tone of the seasoned reporter. Behind him, the years of patient questioning. Telephone calls, long bus journeys, the sun on his unshaven face. The words of his first editor in his ear. Doubt and you’ll not be deceived.
‘Please. I’m trying to get this straight. You’re worried that your wife might have been tortured and raped because you sent her a joyful text?’
‘You don’t understand these people, John Dyer,’ he said from within his invisible hole. ‘I thought that you at least … with your experience of the Shining Path … would know what human beings are capable of … would see that I’m saying the truth.’
He had to pause to catch his breath. But he had not finished. ‘I always hoped, because she had a marvellous thing for life, that she would escape … She had always managed to … She had an animal’s instinct for survival. When I heard her as a petrified animal, it went quickly through my head, “God, she’s lost.” Now I’ve stopped hoping.’
The helplessness in his voice was enough to tell Dyer it was true.
‘Is there no way to secure Shula’s release?’
Oh, nothing could be simpler, said Marvar with an unconvincingly pleasant smile. One call from his mobile would do it – to General Damghani, revealing what Marvar had achieved nine days earlier in a room on the second floor of the Clarendon, and how to repeat the experiment.
Marvar had wanted to shout it to everyone! He agreed with Robert Oppenheimer: ‘A scientist cannot hold back progress because of fears of what the world will do with his discovery.’ Even to Dyer’s imperfect understanding, the implications of Marvar’s breakthrough were groundbreaking, although the word did not seem strong enough. Chances were that Marvar, if he was telling the truth, had broken more new ground than Oppenheimer. Not only did fusion matter, it was probably, given the way we were heading, the single thing that mattered. His spherical laser. The sun on earth. What tremendous consequences, in the right humanitarian hands, for our planet. No mining for coal. No fracking for gas. No oil spills. No more pollution. No more global warming … An inexhaustible supply of energy at little cost; all it needed was water. The fabric of world energy would change overnight. Deserts would be irrigated. Places bypassed because previously so dry would become the most fertile. With the assistance of reverse-osmosis water purifiers, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Sinai would be gardens of Eden, creating food for the world. There was nothing that Marvar’s nuclear ‘football’ might not improve. In the right hands.
But an equal force held Marvar back. What if his discovery got into the wrong hands? This was the prospect that paralysed him.
‘Don’t you want the Clarendon to know what you’ve done?’ said Dyer, not certain how to continue.
‘And have Cubbage pass it to America!’
Marvar didn’t trust the Americans to use the technology peacefully. Dyer mustn’t be lulled by the siren voices of men like Professor Whitton who insisted that fusion was safe. ‘Don’t believe anyone who tells you it’s clean.’ Oppenheimer’s appalled reaction to the H-bomb was the correct one: it was like the plague of Thebes.
Yes, cheap and easy fusion held out the prospect of salvation, but in the same fiery breath it threatened a destruction that had no parallel in history, save for the kind of meteoric explosion that had once gouged out the Mexican Gulf and destroyed the dinosaurs.
Today’s dinosaurs were the American president on one side, and on the other the fanatical Revolutionary Guards who had arrested Shula and Jamileh, and pledged to incinerate Israel from the face of the earth. Whatever promises they had signed in order to secure the nuclear agreement, Dyer needed to know that for the past forty years these men had sought nuclear weapons. The US president’s belligerent behaviour had prompted the Guards to renew their search. Fusion would give access to a new type of weapon whose limits could not yet be imagined. Marvar’s device – with no great alteration – would grant the Guards an obscene dominion, not merely over Israel, but over the Middle East and beyond. North Korea could supply the rocket. But you wouldn’t need a rocket. You wouldn’t even need high planes bombing. A single bullet would do. A bullet with a capsule in it, containing deuterium-tritium fuel, fired at extremely high velocity. The Empire State Building. The Taj Mahal. Big Ben. The Bodleian. Marvar held up two fingers and pointed at a family of ducks drifting beside the riverbank. Boom boom boom.
Marvar had gone through it all, over and over. He was aware – his last twenty years had trained him – that people would welcome his invention for good reasons and for bad reasons. Then there were those who would not welcome it at all – for the reason that Marvar was Iranian. Two obdurate enemies of fusion were Russia and Saudi Arabia, among the most unstable countries in the world. ‘If someone said: “We now have the technology to change the planet: no more petrol, no more coal, no more gas,” how would Putin treat that? How would the Saudis? The oil cartels would be demented.’
Financiers, investors, hedge-fund managers – they’d all want a share of the knowledge, Marvar said. ‘The cost of world energy is seven trillion dollars per annum. One per cent is seventy billion. If you were to license the process, you’d get more than one per cent. It would dwarf the riches of the richest …’
It was against Marvar’s every dictate to hand over his knowledge to those who would abuse it as they’d abused Shula. At the same time, his heart was full of his wife. Raped, with a mouthful of ants, not knowing what he had done.
Dyer saw it with terrifying clarity. Marvar might get his wife back by telling … But if he told … His dilemma was inflexible. That was why he stood there like a salmon flapping on the bank. Everything in his face, the way he moved his shoulders and ran dismayed hands over his coat, feeling for the answer in the cloth between the buttons, showed his desolation. He was not here. He was somewhere else, in his own cell, alone.
They had walked beyond the weir to the stretch of river where the college eights practised. The clouds had dispersed and there was a band of clear sky, page white, above the trees. A light wind was swaying the branches. The Thames murmured, horses, cows, ducks. On sunny mornings, Dyer would run here. Had anyone the right to annihilate this? From somewhere, he heard the metallic notes of a marsh tit.
Marvar heard it too. In his coat, he stood and stared at the bare trees, searching for the source of the sound. He seemed infinitely sadder, now that he had unburdened himself. He had talked to Dyer as if he wanted to prolong the world for as long as possible without this knowledge. (‘How long would it take otherwise?’ ‘Years!’) He had no words left to say. Birds wheeled overhead, disappearing. The wind blew ripples on the water. He was one of the barges on the canal, rudderless, pot-plants in the little curtained windows, beer cans, the refuge for vagrants. He was back where he started when he stood blinking at Dyer outside the Oxford University Press, not knowing what to do.
Dyer pointed.
‘Look. He’s over there.’
Marvar followed the direction of Dyer’s finger to a dark tiny speck, balanced on the middle of three telephone wires like a solitary musical note
.
‘He? How can you be so certain?’
It was Dyer’s turn to tell Marvar something he didn’t know: it had been an amateur who discovered that male cuckoos do the singing, as was the case for all songbirds.
Marvar shook his head; he had no idea. ‘You mean,’ in a slow, fascinated tone, ‘that if you hear a bird singing, it’s a male … Now that is incredible.’
For perhaps ten seconds more they stood in silence and listened, until the bird flew off.
Marvar gave a little sigh. He gently rubbed the back of his knuckles. ‘The atomic bombs – they had male names too, you know.’
Just then, as if a door had opened, a cold gust sprang up. Dyer looked at his watch. The football match would be over. Their two sons would be tucking into their prawn sandwiches and banana cake, supplied by a caterer in Summertown.
‘Why not come home for a drink – unless you’ve got other plans?’
‘Plans?’ It was an empty laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. ‘I have no plans.’
As they turned to go, the geese came over low up the river, a wedge of large brown Vs, sharp against the darkening sky, babbling, surging on.
Chapter Fifteen
FOR THE SECOND TIME THAT afternoon, Dyer relieved Marvar of his coat.
‘I could do with an overcoat like this. Where did you get it?’
They were standing in the hallway, next to the fishing rod.
‘Shula had it made for me before I came here,’ said Marvar.
Stitched into the collar was a label that Dyer hadn’t noticed before. It showed a red egret and a word in Farsi – the name of a master tailor off Laleh-zar Street, Marvar explained. ‘He warned her that Oxford is exceedingly damp.’
Smiling, Dyer went to hang it up again.
Leandro was at a sleepover with Samir. They could drink. They could talk. Marvar could decide what he was going to do.
He heard a chair groan as Marvar sat down.
Coming back into the kitchen, Dyer flapped open a cardboard box and pulled out a bottle, showing it. ‘I’ve only got white.’
‘I’ll drink white wine.’
‘I’ll put it in the freezer.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll have it warm.’ He looked at the label. He was not reading it.
Dyer poured the glasses.
Marvar picked up his. He drank as if warm white wine and he were made for each other.
‘Who else knows about your discovery?’ asked Dyer, sitting down.
‘Just you. You’re the only one.’
Marvar had dismantled his spherical laser. But it was easy to make another – if you knew how, if you had the formula. You only needed the formula.
‘Where’s that? On your laptop?’
‘Don’t worry, it’s safe. I’m not so foolish.’ He would never risk putting anything on a computer. Every Tom, Dick, and Ralph could hack into it. Every Ayatollah too, mirthlessly.
His aversion was understandable. It made Dyer suddenly think of Rejas, who had told him how Ezequiel never wrote anything down, and neither did Socrates or Jesus. ‘The problem with text is that it assumes its own reality. It cannot answer, and it cannot explain.’
But Marvar hadn’t gone quite to that extreme. He ran a finger around the rim of his glass. ‘Know the best way to keep a secret? With a pen and paper – like in the old days. But you’re a writer,’ gesturing at Dyer’s notes and his book, still open, on the table, awaiting an inscription, ‘you know that.’
Marvar had condensed his planet-shifting invention to an algorithm on a single piece of paper. Handwritten. One copy. ‘You don’t need any other.’
That was the beauty of science, he said. It wasn’t so hard to understand as love or war. Everything could be lasered down into a few letters and numbers which you could hold in your palm.
Yet the problem remained. Who to give it to? Marvar widened his eyes, staring fiercely through his glasses at his open palm as if he would read the answer there.
Give it to the Mullahs and perhaps get Shula back, but risk them weaponising his discovery? Give it to his Australian professor at the Clarendon, but risk it passing into the hands of Iran’s enemies? Did he entrust it to the most respectable body within his field – the European Atomic Energy Community, say? Or did he broadcast it to the world, through Wikileaks or a newspaper? Was the answer ‘everyone’ – or ‘no one’? What if Marvar couldn’t find anybody who was deserving of this information: ‘What if there is no right person?’
The Sandpit Page 10
