Cry Darkness

by Hilary Bonner

  ‘I see.’

  Jones turned away from the REG to directly face Connie.

  ‘Right, then. See you tomorrow? Same time, same place? And let’s go for the full series of 5000 trials in a block of one hundred runs, shall we?’

  Connie Pike raised her eyebrows in surprise, but this time Jones wasn’t so sure that her behaviour was genuine. She must be well accustomed to the affect she, her project, and her unlikely laboratory had on people, Jones reckoned. Converting sceptics was probably her house speciality.

  ‘Abso-damned-lutely!’ said Connie.

  She showed Jones to the door, then put a restraining hand on her arm.

  ‘Wait.’

  Connie turned on her heel, disappeared into her office for just a few seconds, and returned carrying a blue button badge, just like the one she was wearing.

  Smiling she pinned it to one of the lapels of Jones’s denim jacket.

  ‘Have a good evening,’ she said.

  ‘You too,’ Jones replied, touching the badge with the fingers of one hand. ‘And thanks for this.’

  Once outside she remembered the time, the all too pressing thesis she had to complete, and the fact that she’d only visited RECAP to keep Ed happy.

  ‘I must be going barking mad,’ she muttered to herself as she hurried along the corridor and out into the grounds en route to the main building. When she reached the entrance hall, she unpinned the little blue badge Connie had given her, held it in the palm of her hand and looked at it.

  ‘Subvert the Dominant Paradigm.’

  She muttered the words aloud, wondering what it was about Connie Pike, and the whole RECAP project, that was sucking her in so quickly.

  Nonetheless, she then tucked the little button badge into her jeans’ pocket. She might be turning into a psi freak, but she had no intention of advertising the fact.

  FIVE

  From that very first visit to the RECAP lab, flattered by the possibility of being a particularly receptive operator, captivated by Connie Pike, in awe of Paul Ruders, whom she came to believe really was a genius, Jones was hooked.

  Until nearly the end of her four-year stint at Princeton she spent much of her spare time at the RECAP lab, endlessly operating trials on the REG, correlating results, making up graphs. And always working in the dark, with little idea really either of what was likely to be achieved or even of what it may be possible to achieve, yet nonetheless enthralled by the prospect of what might be.

  The secret of consciousness, the last great mystery of the human race. Most people, Jones realized, had a story to tell of sensing something strange, or of an awareness of a situation or an event which contemporary science could not explain. Being aware of eyes staring at you, even from behind your back, was perhaps the most common experience, followed closely by having some kind of knowledge of the death or injury of a loved one in another place. But all these stories, at the end of the day, were merely the kind of anecdote that had been related and passed on throughout the ages.

  The trials being conducted at Princeton and elsewhere, as initiated by Paul Ruders, were something different. This was valid correlated scientific exploration. At the beginning Jones, always a sceptic at heart, looked everywhere for flaws in the way the various tests were conducted. She could find none. Just as Connie had told her in the beginning, all RECAP experiments were governed by the strictest of laboratory conditions.

  She therefore came to the conclusion that the results of the RECAP trials were inarguable.

  Yet they remained inexplicable. Paul Ruders never seemed to doubt that one day the mystery of consciousness would be solved, but he didn’t say a lot. Connie, on the other hand, talked enough for both of them. And always colourfully.

  ‘Chasing the rainbow,’ was how she usually referred to the ultimate aims of RECAP.

  ‘Do you realize we could find what we are looking for and not even know it?’ she remarked one night when she and Jones were alone together in the lab in the early hours, Professor Ruders, the by-then at least partially house-trained Lulu trotting along behind him, having finally gone home to his wife.

  ‘I’ll know,’ Jones replied at once.

  Connie raised both eyebrows.

  ‘Not short of confidence are you, Sandy?’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Jones replied. ‘Mind you, I was absolutely confident that I would never in my life get involved in anything like RECAP.’

  ‘Well, we’re all very glad you did,’ Connie told her.

  And Jones felt a warm glow in her belly.

  The glittering academic career to which Sandy Jones aspired, was a world away from the psi experimentation of RECAP, and she was aware that her association with the programme might be regarded by the academic establishment as the only blot on an otherwise exemplary residency at Princeton. But she continued to risk it, ignoring the odd puzzled frown from the hierarchy. The REG programme fascinated her. She couldn’t leave it alone.

  However, ultimately the natural conflict between the hard fact of her ambition and the seductive vagary of RECAP led to Jones having to make a choice. A choice, deep inside, that she had probably always known, was inevitable.

  During her final year at Princeton, she began to think seriously about her immediate future. The American university was rich, both in material wealth and in opportunity. She had been left in little doubt that there were openings within its diverse employment structure which were hers for the taking. And she and Ed had somehow drifted into discussions about their joint future, almost as if that were inevitable. Nobody proposed marriage, but Ed did mention casually more than once that if she married him, the resulting American citizenship would remove any obstacles there might be to her enjoying a high-flying career in the States. Then, towards the end of her last semester, when her final thesis had been completed and her doctorate was about to be bestowed, she learned that she was being considered for a particularly sought-after research fellowship back in the UK, at London’s Goldsmith College. It was a position considerably more senior than would usually be offered to a newly qualified doctor, and one which she knew would open the door to the most elevated areas of British and international academia.

  She told Ed that she wasn’t sure if she wanted it, which was a lie, and that she didn’t think she would get it anyway, which was true. And she reminded him that acquiring nationality by marriage worked both ways round, which she really shouldn’t have done because she had absolutely no intention of marrying Ed MacEntee.

  She flew back to London to meet the Goldsmith hierarchy, and it was there that Professor Michael O’Grady came into her life. He was probably Britain’s top biologist, not only was he brilliant, and a TV star with his own BBC Two series, The World Around Us, but he was also handsome, and oozed Irish charm. He was known as Dr Darling. And Sandy was later to wonder how she had failed to realize immediately that he had to be too good to be true.

  Instead, she fell under his spell from the beginning, and, even though he had made no secret of being a married man, allowed herself to be seduced by him that very first night. O’Grady was everything Ed wasn’t. He was an accomplished and passionate lover, and the sex was by far the best Sandy Jones had ever experienced. She hadn’t realized that she could care about it that much. But during those few days in London, O’Grady overwhelmed her, physically and in every way. When they weren’t in bed, he whisked her off to the best restaurants in town, to a reception at 10 Downing Street, and to a garden party at Buckingham Palace.

  It was all totally seductive for the girl from the wrong side of the track. In just a brief few days she fell head over heels in love, for the first time in her young life. And her head was totally turned. She realized also that what O’Grady had could possibly also be hers, that maybe she could be a part of that world. Indeed, amongst the high-flying media people he introduced her to was the TV executive who would one day offer Sandy Jones her first opportunity in broadcasting.

  She quickly learned that O’Grady, who was fourteen years her
senior, had a reputation for being an inveterate womanizer, but she didn’t care. It would be different with her. She would change him.

  On the day before she was due to return to Princeton she was formally offered the Goldsmith research fellowship and accepted it on the spot. She travelled back to Princeton merely to collect her belongings and formally receive her doctorate.

  She told Ed as little as possible, indicating disingenuously that the Goldsmith position was not a permanent one, and she had made no long-term decision.

  She certainly did not mention that she’d fallen heavily in love with another man.

  Ed appeared to take the news well enough, even congratulating her on her appointment, but she could only suspect what he was really feeling, this quiet, genuine man who had been her very best friend for four years, and whom she knew loved her in a manner she had never quite been able to reciprocate.

  ‘Just say the word and I’ll come and join you,’ he’d remarked lightly.

  ‘Oh, I’ll be back before you know it,’ she’d replied, knowing full well that was another lie, and that she was almost certainly about to break Ed’s heart.

  She realized that she was being cowardly, but she couldn’t face telling him that their relationship was over.

  Ultimately she only remained in Princeton for a few days, during which she avoided Connie, and all concerned with the RECAP project, as much as possible, merely letting them know casually that she would not be staying in Princeton after all. She was vaguely aware that Connie and Paul, Connie in particular, were deeply disappointed. But, at that moment in time, Jones didn’t care.

  Back in England, she at once became so immersed in her new life that Princeton and most of what had happened there slipped swiftly into a compartment at the very back of her mind. She and Connie kept in touch, but she very soon broke off all communication with Ed. Without a word of explanation. Not least because she had no idea what to say to him. She knew how shabbily she was behaving, but didn’t seem able to stop herself. She was already pregnant. Unlike with Ed, she and O’Grady had never taken any precautions. She didn’t even remember the subject being mentioned. The whole thing was crazy. But quite wonderfully so. At first.

  O’Grady divorced his wife, not only with unseemly haste, but also with apparent ease. Jones eagerly agreed to marry him as soon as he was free. The birth of their twin sons, Lee and Matt, led her new husband to commend her on her efficiency in producing an instant family. For a brief period she took a break from her academic work, and was blissfully happy caring for her new babies, and basking in the love of her charismatic husband. Or that’s how she saw things. But in what seemed like no time at all, O’Grady’s perennially roving eye reasserted itself, and alighted upon a research assistant even younger, and certainly prettier, than his wife. History repeated itself. Within three years Sandy found herself divorced and bringing up her sons largely on her own.

  Only then, not infrequently besieged by a terrible sense of emptiness, did her thoughts turn to Princeton again, and she would experience the dull ache of regret, and an overwhelming longing for what might have been.

  Two decades later, flying across the Atlantic in the aftermath of tragedy, the memories were suddenly startlingly vivid, including her shameful behaviour when she had so carelessly cast it all aside.

  And it caused Sandy Jones more pain than she would ever have believed to know that Connie and Paul were dead. That she would never see either of them again.

  Their work had mushroomed, of course, beyond Paul and Connie’s original dreams. The computer age and the Internet had seen to that. Jones knew there were now more than a hundred Random Events Generators throughout the world, more than a million series of laboratory condition tests had been completed, producing literally billions of trials, all with similar results to those achieved at RECAP from the beginning.

  These REGs, sometimes known as RNGs, or Random Number Generators, were installed at various accepted academic and scientific establishments not only across America but in all five continents, in cities as diverse as Beijing and Edinburgh, Tokyo and Sydney, Amsterdam and Moscow. All of them were linked to a database at RECAP, the home and the heart of the Global Consciousness Project, under Paul’s directorship. Or rather, they had been until the lab had been destroyed and Paul killed.

  They weren’t Heath Robinson boxes any more. Nowadays a REG was a USB device, not much bigger than a standard memory stick, which merely plugged into the appropriate computer outlet. And many of those who had installed them worldwide – often post-graduate students yet to be pressurized into moving away from such a controversial area of science – were initially sceptics, just as Jones had been to begin with. Often, they barely believed the results of their own experiments. Yet they were united in being convinced of the accuracy, and also in believing that the Global Consciousness Project was at the very least nipping at the ankles of something quite extraordinary and revolutionary.

  In spite of that, RECAP had remained ever under pressure, always under some sort of threat, usually financial. Jones was acutely aware of how much she could have helped the project over the years, had she wished to do so. But they’d never asked for her help – not until Connie’s call of a few days ago, that is – and she had never offered it.

  Yet now, when it was probably too late, certainly too late for Connie and Paul, she was jetting off to the rescue. And a good half of her didn’t know what the hell she thought she was doing, nor indeed who the hell she thought she was. A cross, perhaps, between Wonder Woman and her near namesake, Indiana Jones?

  At times during the journey she tried to sleep but largely failed, her brain racing as she began to consider the task ahead. Whatever exactly that might prove to be.

  She didn’t even know if her dead friends had any relatives. Paul had been a widower, and Jones was aware that his only child had died very young. As for Connie, well, to her shame, Jones realized that she’d never known anything much about Connie Pike’s personal life, beyond the fact that she had been married as a young woman and quite swiftly divorced. She had no idea what relationships Connie may or may not have had since then. It had always seemed to her that Connie’s whole existence revolved around RECAP and those who were involved with the project. She’d always been there for Sandy Jones, and for the others. But, looking back, it had all been rather one sided. Which, perhaps led to the real reason why Sandy Jones was on this aircraft. She felt so guilty about so much.

  The instructions were given to fasten seat belts for landing. Jones decided that all she could do now was to take things step by step.

  At JFK she would grab a yellow cab to New York’s Penn Station and then catch a train on to that so familiar other-worldly university town. Newark would have been a more convenient airport to fly into en route to Princeton, but there had been no suitable flight available.

  She checked her watch. The flight was due to arrive at four thirty p.m. and appeared to be on time. If she was lucky she could be at Penn by around six. The train journey to Princeton Junction would take just over an hour, the trains were frequent, and Jones was travelling light with only hand luggage, just the one capacious shoulder bag.

  Suddenly she knew exactly what she was going to do first when she reached Princeton, whom she would visit straight away. She doubted she’d be welcome, but she didn’t care. And she certainly did not intend to give any warning.

  PART THREE

  Most people … make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

  William James

  SIX

  She rang the bell on the intercom system. He didn’t answer, instead buzzing the front door open. Maybe he was expecting someone else? She entered anyway, and made her way upstairs to his apartment.

&
nbsp; She could hear a dog barking.

  It was another minute or two before he came to the door, a little black terrier bouncing around his feet. His face was pale and drawn, etched with shock and grief. He was wearing a grubby grey tracksuit which hung from his bony frame. His eyes opened wide with surprise when he saw her.

  ‘It’s been a long time,’ Jones heard herself say, immediately thinking what a terrible opening remark that was.

  ‘Sandy?’

  He appeared to be asking her to confirm her identity.

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’

  She managed a tentative smile.

  Ed just stared at her.

  ‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’

  For a split second she thought he was going to refuse. Send her away. And she wouldn’t have blamed him if he did. Also, it occurred to her suddenly that he may not be alone. Connie had told her that Ed had married, only a couple of years after she did, that there had been a daughter, and that he and his wife had later divorced. But that was all she knew.

  Eventually Ed stepped back into the hallway and gestured for her to enter. It was a small but cosy apartment. He led her to a bright blue and yellow kitchen at the rear.

  The weather was unusually warm and muggy for New Jersey in mid-September, but Ed’s air-conditioning was so powerfully cold that Jones felt herself involuntarily shiver.

  Ed’s shoulders were slumped low, his walk a shuffle. He moved the way Jones felt, on that dreadfully sad day. He sat down at a little scrubbed wooden table, bearing an overflowing ashtray and an empty coffee cup, and gestured for her to join him.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d ever take up smoking,’ she said, more for something to say than anything else.

  He looked at her with something bordering distaste, and she didn’t like it at all.