Connie took a step outside, walking across the paved area close to her house, the house she was brought up in, and onto the pristine lawn, her rubber boots leaving behind a trail of dark footprints.
She was wearing a shocking pink anorak, lined in orange nylon fur which protruded around the collar and the cuffs, clashing spectacularly with her red hair.
In one green woollen gloved hand she carried a spade. She walked straight to the young apple tree furthest from the house, turned smartly left and took five carefully measured steps towards the now frozen birdbath by the fence. Then she stopped and, quite gently, exploratively, pushed the blade of her spade into the snow.
The snow was still soft, as was the earth beneath it, kept warm by its thick white blanket. But Connie knew that could change any day soon, the snow turn to ice, and the soil beneath it freeze. If she didn’t dig now, it might be weeks, or even months, before she would be able to get a spade into the ground again.
She looked up at the cold blue sky and shivered. She was actually warm inside her pink coat, but she shivered because of all that had happened and the quite monumental decision she had made last summer. A decision which had caused terrible death and destruction, but one she had stuck to throughout, because she was quite sure that what had happened already was nothing compared with what would have happened had she taken a different path.
Not only had she so wanted to tell Marion the truth, she’d also been desperate to tell Sandy Jones. She hated knowing that Sandy now thought so badly of her, although believed it likely the English doctor still wouldn’t have approved of what Connie had done. Nor accepted her reasoning. Sandy was probably too worldly for that. And, in spite of the risks she had taken in speaking out about RECAP, Connie, the explosion, and so on, Sandy Jones was an ambitious woman who would not have taken kindly to any damage that might have been done to her celebrated career.
Sandy would never have been able to keep the secret. She wouldn’t have been able to resist telling the world.
Connie Pike didn’t think the world was ready. She hadn’t thought the world was ready before the lunatics, who did the dirty work for the other lunatics who dared to sit in government offices, had so horrendously confirmed it. After they had ruthlessly blown up half of Princeton’s scientific research block in order to destroy RECAP and murder her and Paul, she’d known that the world wasn’t ready.
Connie didn’t wish to share the destiny of Carl Oppenheimer. Connie did not wish to be a shatterer of worlds. And neither did she want that to be Paul Ruders’ legacy. Paul had been a great humanitarian as well as a genius. And his genius had been such that it had at first risen above the terrible disease of the mind which had so cruelly struck him down.
Indeed the workings of the human mind never failed to amaze Connie, even though she’d spent her entire life studying just that in one way or another. It had been almost as if the early stages of Alzheimer’s had opened up certain areas of Paul Ruders’ mind, even as they’d closed others, and given him a freedom of thought he would not otherwise have had. All along, of course, he’d confided in Connie, shared his discoveries with her, just as he always had. Although she’d kept that a secret too. But as Paul had become more deluded so he’d proceeded to destroy much of his work, while being convinced that he was improving it. And all the while the interest of the outside agencies which Paul must somehow inadvertently have aroused – and Connie still did not know how – grew more and more sinister.
Mikey had approached Connie and Paul quite aggressively, and told them that he knew Paul had produced an effective theory of consciousness, and that he represented government bodies who insisted upon immediate access. For the good of America.
‘If you tell anybody I’ve made this approach it will be all the worse, for you two and for RECAP,’ Mikey had threatened.
Connie hadn’t been afraid of Mikey MacEntee, whom she knew vaguely as Ed’s rather fanciful brother, but she was afraid of the kind of people she suspected he worked for. So she dismissed at once her first instinct, which was to confide in Ed. She didn’t think Mikey MacEntee would harm his own brother. But she feared that his employers might. She feared they might harm almost anyone who got in their way.
Paul, of course, forgot about the confrontation with Mikey almost as it happened, leaving Connie to deal with it. At first Connie stalled. She knew about Mikey’s Walter Mitty tendencies. She told herself he might just be playing one of his games again, even though he had been pretty convincing. But when she and Paul suddenly started being pressurized – and the Internal Revenue investigations and the speeding tickets and all the rest of it began to happen – Connie came to realize that this was no game.
She ultimately decided to appear to comply with Mikey, partly in order to protect Paul himself, but more importantly to protect Paul’s work.
It had seemed like such a good idea, at first, to supply Mikey and his employers with one of Paul’s later efforts – a completely worthless paper. That way Connie had hoped she would safeguard much more than the future of RECAP.
And as she stood in her back garden on that quite glorious winter’s afternoon, Connie Pike still had no intention of allowing the wrong people to get their hands on the real Ruders Theory.
It did exist, of course. Paul Ruders had produced something near miraculous. Something magnificent. And from the beginning Connie Pike had been all too aware of how terribly it could be misused. She remained determined not to let that happen.
Connie didn’t know what Jimmy Cecil had told Sandy Jones. Connie didn’t even know there was a Jimmy Cecil. But, just like the somewhat mysterious Englishman, she’d always believed that the solution to the secret of consciousness would ultimately prove to be potentially a far more powerful weapon than the splitting of the atom. And that continued to frighten her. Which was partly why she had much preferred the journey of RECAP to the concept of reaching a destination.
Connie Pike tightened her grip on her spade, pushed it more forcefully into the ground, and, using her foot to put extra pressure on the top edge of the blade, began to dig.
She had already played God once, and now she was doing it again. But then, she didn’t believe in God. She believed only in the power of the human mind. She believed that, ultimately, human beings held sole responsibility for the future destiny of their race. And that, in the modern world, scientists carried far greater responsibility than anyone in government, because knowledge was so much more powerful than politics. More powerful even than any force, military or otherwise, that governments could exert. She also believed, looking back on the mistakes of the past, that it was not necessarily a straightforward progression for science to meekly hand over to national government a discovery which would have colossal impact on the entire planet.
A metallic clank echoed through the clear air as the cutting edge of Connie Pike’s spade hit metal. She dug around, pushing the soil aside, until a steel box, about a foot long, ten inches wide, and six inches deep, was revealed. Then she lifted the box out of the ground and dropped it on to the snow by her feet.
Connie had destroyed every computer file of the original Paul Ruders Theory, and she had done so irrevocably. She’d known the Crime Scenes Investigators would find nothing on the desktop iMac at Paul’s house, even though it was true that she had been somehow drawn there after the explosion. Perhaps as a kind of pilgrimage. Or maybe just out of guilt. She wasn’t sure. But she’d lied to Sandy Jones about that too. She’d been to the house days earlier, when she had known Paul was at the university, using the key he’d kept hidden in a plant pot in his potting shed. She’d checked out the iMac, and thrown Paul’s laptop – which did contain a copy of the theory – into Lake Carnegie, replacing it with another, confident that he was at a stage in his degenerative illness when he was past noticing.
She had half wanted to destroy the theory altogether. And for ever. But the scientist in her, the explorer of the mind, had been congenitally unable to do so.
She’d kept
just one copy of the true Ruders Theory of Consciousness. Nobody else in the world knew of its existence. It was a hard copy. It was, in fact, the original. An extraordinary document comprising over 300 pages of A4 paper, covered with words, figures, and equations all in Paul Ruders’ neat and meticulous hand. And it lay, wrapped in several layers of plastic, within the steel box at her feet.
Connie did not intend to do anything with the document. Not yet. After all, more than ever before she believed the world wasn’t ready. She wanted only to look at it again. To hold it. To study it. To be privy once more to mankind’s greatest mystery. Then she would bury it again in her garden.
A bolt of excitement shot through her as she carried the steel box indoors, opened it, and removed the contents. She unravelled the protective plastic and held out, on the upturned palms of both hands, the thick sheaf of handwritten pages.
The real Ruders paper lay before her. Not only Paul’s finest achievement, but almost certainly the most remarkable scientific advancement of modern times. Possibly the most remarkable scientific advancement of any time.
She had in her grasp The Secret of Consciousness. Humanity’s last great mystery. Her eyes filled with tears.
It was pretty much all that Connie Pike had left now. And, one day, she hoped, perhaps one day, it would be possible to give this great gift of a great man to the world. Without fear.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The most grateful thanks are due to the late Professor Robert G. Jahn, founder of PEAR, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (the inspiration for my fictional RECAP), and to Brenda J. Dunne, MS, twenty-eight years PEAR laboratory manager.
They welcomed me to Princeton, invited me to spend time in their unique lab – even taking part in some of their experiments – and shared with me their belief in, and passion for, the extraordinary project that has been a life’s work for them both.
Thanks also to New Jersey State Police for permitting me to explore their unusual police station at Princeton (including the cell block!); to my good friend Lucius Barre for his assistance throughout my New York and Princeton research trip; and to the late Ian Robertson, former star of the Kirov Ballet, for his most particular guidance on crossing international borders.
Special thanks to my editor Kate Lyall Grant for allowing me to publish a book which is both dear to my heart and something of a departure from usual.
And finally, a huge thank you to my long-time agent and treasured friend Tony Peake, for his continual support and encouragement through the good times and the not so good. As ever, Mr Peake.
Cry Darkness Page 29
