And there where the article should have been was instead a neatly clipped rectangular hole.
Athene’s possession of the newspaper was suspicious enough, but her meticulous removal of the Globescope article raised suspicion to a pitch of confounded disbelief. Harry wrenched the door open and rushed through the conservatory into the drawing room, pausing only to listen to the stillness of the empty house. She was not there. But she had so often been there that the walls and furnishings the very air itself seemed ingrained with her presence. She was not there. But Harry did not feel entirely alone. He followed his instincts along the hall to the study. It was as he remembered, the desk loaded with papers, the shelves with books. The photograph of Princeton Institute luminaries circa 1953 still hung above the mantelpiece. And the blackboard… was blank. Harry goggled at it in a kind of wonder. Where were the equations, the formulae, the jumbled Greek letters? Where was the work in progress? Erased, apparently. But why? What had made erasure necessary?
He rounded the desk and cast aimlessly through the stacks of paper. Here too blankness was the norm. The clutter had more than a hint of contrivance about it. Even the blotter contained fresh unmarked paper. And the desk diary, lying where it could not be missed, was for the old year. Somehow, Harry would have expected such a rigorous thinker as Athene Tilson to have replaced it with a new one promptly on 1 January. Her failure to have done so struck him as a portent, both indefinable and undeniable.
He opened the diary and leafed through it to the date she had given him for Hammelgaard’s visit: 20 September. David’s friend, she had scribbled. 3.30. He leafed on to his own visit, unsure for the moment of the date. Then it was there, in front of him. But it was not what he was prepared for. Beneath the heading for 25 October was written: David’s father 11.45.
He had not told her he was David’s father until he had arrived. He had not told her and she could scarcely have guessed. The diary entry was either made after the event which seemed singularly pointless or she had known all along. She had known what Iris had fondly believed no-one could know. She had known even before Harry had known himself.
He wrenched at the drawer beneath the desk, anger adding to his impatience. It was locked and stoutly constructed. But locks were not going to stop him. He strode out into the hall and along to the kitchen, where he hunted down a carving fork and an old butcher’s steel that looked as if they would do the job between them.
A strange sensation ran through him as he retraced his steps along the hall. It was as if he had walked into a cobweb; as if a brush had been passed over his head or a razor been slid across his unshaven chin. He pulled up and examined himself in a full-length mirror that hung beside a barometer next to the telephone table. As he reached up to rub his forehead, his hair frizzed out to meet his hand. The telephone tinkled faintly, just once, then fell silent.
He went on, then stopped again. The door to the study stood ajar, whereas he had surely left it wide open. There were no open windows to create a draught. And there was no-one else in the house. Was there?
Hesitantly, he pushed the door away from him and entered the room, turning slowly to look towards the desk. Where Athene Tilson sat smiling expectantly. “Hello, Harry,” she said mildly. “Looking for something?” She slid the desk drawer open as she spoke, lifted out half a dozen identical blue cloth-bound notebooks held together with a rubber band and dropped the bundle in front of her on the blotter.
“You know what these are, don’t you, Harry? You were asking about them last time you came here. They’re David’s notebooks. All of them. Just waiting for you.”
SIXTY-TWO
At first glance, Athene Tilson was just as she had been ten weeks before. Grey-haired and thin to the point of gauntness, dressed in guernsey, tennis shirt and corduroy trousers, she could easily have been taken for a frail old woman surrendering shabbily to advancing years.
But a second glance told a different story. Gone were the round-shouldered stoop and arthritic stiffness, gone too a clutch of implied weaknesses and suggested failings. She was a woman transformed. Or one revealed, perhaps, for what in truth she had always been. There was nothing cosmetic about it. Artifice had been abandoned. That certainty communicated itself to Harry in the erect ness of her bearing, the intensity of her gaze, the intimidating placidity of her presence. He felt like some bucolic intruder confronting a high priestess. What she knew he could scarcely hope to understand. And what he understood she already knew.
“Sit down, Harry,” she said calmly, pointing to a chair. “Let’s talk.”
Numbly, Harry obeyed, dropping the carving fork and steel onto the carpet beside him. “I didn’t… hear you come in,” he murmured.
“You’ve done well,” she said. “Really. Exceptionally well. I think David’s tenacity must have been an inherited trait, don’t you?”
“How would I know?” Harry managed to toss back. “I never met him.”
“I’m sorrier for that than I can ever say. He asked my advice, after tracking you down in Rhodes. He asked what I thought he should do about you. I recommended him to forget you, to exclude you from his life. I was wrong. I did to you what so many others have done to me. I underestimated you. I mistook the superficial for the substantial. I am so very sorry. It was unforgivable. More so, perhaps, than other more drastic actions I’ve taken since.”
“What actions?”
There’s no need for me to tell you, Harry. You already know.”
Tell me about Dobermann.”
“So that’s what brings you here. You made the connection, did you? After all my efforts to prevent you.”
“I want the truth.”
“Really? Are you sure about that?”
“What was it with you and Dobermann and David?”
“What was it? It was a dream. Their dream and my nightmare.”
“You’re talking in riddles.”
“It is a riddle. But it’s no game.”
“Dobermann phoned here while you were away in November. Mace took a message.”
“She never told me that.”
“She told me:
“What was the message?”
“He said he’d remembered. After more than thirty years, he’d remembered.”
“My fault,” Athene said in an undertone. “Entirely mine.”
“What had he remembered?”
“Something he would have done better to forget for ever.”
“What?”
The answer to the riddle.”
“Just tell me:
“Very well.” She reached out and ran her hand across the cover of the topmost notebook. “But it’s so difficult to explain. There are no words to describe the structure of the world as it has become apparent to my mind. The range and acuity of my perception have grown with age. Once, all was dazzle and confusion. Now, the clarity is … incredible. The ability is latent in your mind as well, Harry. And in the mind of every shopper walking the streets of Southwold. If it became actual, you’d be like a blind man given telephoto sight. There’s a scale difference a phase shift you literally can’t envisage.”
“You’re talking about higher dimensions.”
“I am.”
“Hocus-pocus, according to Adam Slade.”
“Everything is in the mind of a charlatan. Believe that’s what I am, if you wish. It’s probably safer. Believe what I’m about to tell you is an old woman’s fantasy. But it isn’t. I know it isn’t.”
“Convince me.”
“I can’t. You’re not a mathematician. You don’t understand. You never will. Good. I’m glad for you.” She smiled. “What did you make of my book?”
“Nothing. It was way over my head.”
“Exactly. But the book is where it begins. Numbers are the key. Their nature and behaviour their possession of a level of reality mathematicians learn to use and respect without ever quite comprehending are shadows cast in the four-dimensional world by the forms above and around and within it. We se
e their shadows, not their shapes. But there cannot be a shadow without a shape. In that book, in the work that went into it, I began to feel my way towards them, as you might feel your way towards the door in a darkened room, slowly and painstakingly. My knowledge has grown exponentially since. It reads to me now like a child’s scribbling-pad, even though it contains secrets no twentieth-century mathematician could hope to understand.” She paused. When she began again, a tiny inflexion of guilt had entered her voice. “None living, I should say.”
“You mean David?”
“And perhaps one other: Srinivasa Ramanujan, the genius from Madras. His surviving work on modular functions suggests that, if he’d lived to read The Implicate Topology of Complex Numbers, its significance would not have been lost on him. But Ramanujan died two years before I was born, aged just thirty-three.”
The same age as David.”
“Yes.” She caressed the notebooks once more. “Thirty-three. A magic number, mathematicians call it. One that recurs in calculations when least expected, for reasons that cannot be fathomed.”
“Except by you?”
Her hand slipped away. She leant back in her chair. “My work attracted distinguished attention, despite its esotericism, or perhaps because of it. I was invited to Princeton largely on account of Godel’s interest in the book, which in turn aroused Einstein’s curiosity. It was there that I made two important discoveries. Firstly, that it might be possible to train the mind to the point where its grasp of the numerological underpinnings of higher dimensions became so sure, so natural, so instinctive, that one might take the mental leap to direct experience of them.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Think that if it will help you sleep at night. But I’m only describing to you a path I’ve already trodden. The existence of higher dimensions has been mathematically verified many times. The compactification theory is a post hoc rationalization. It evades the issue. Ask Miss Trangam how much of the brain we fully understand. If she answers honestly, she will say: hardly any of it. What we call consciousness is partial awareness. The rest is locked up here.” She tapped her forehead. “Waiting for us to turn the key.”
“As you’ve done?”
“In a sense. But a key can lock as well as unlock. That was my second discovery.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that what’s possible is not necessarily desirable. Imagine you are aware of only two spatial dimensions: length and breadth. Then imagine I take a hula hoop, pass it over your head and lower it to the floor around your feet. You have thus become my prisoner. You cannot escape.”
“Why not? I only have to step over it.”
“But you can’t. Height and therefore the idea of raising your foot, the very act of stepping itself is beyond your conception. You don’t believe height exists. The hula hoop is to you an impassable barrier. You’re trapped by the limitations of your own senses.”
“You’re just playing with words.”
“I’m not playing at all. If this room had neither doors nor windows, you would agree we could never leave it?”
“I suppose so, but ‘
“I could simply step out of it, as you would step out of the hula hoop.” For a moment, Harry could think of no riposte. Athene smiled at him, a smile not so much of superiority as of protectiveness. “Don’t you see, Harry? The power conferred on those who attain an awareness of higher dimensions is a power over those who don’t. To entrap. To manipulate. To spy. To hurt. And ultimately to kill without the slightest fear of detection. Who would know who could ever find out if I squeezed your heart until it stopped beating?”
“That’s not… possible.”
“Why not? If skin and bone are no more a barrier than a hula hoop encircling your feet.”
“But they are more. What you’re saying is … madness.”
The attempt may end in madness, certainly. It did in poor Carl’s case. The intellect is a fragile thing. It cannot take too much pressure.”
“You’re saying an attempt to become aware of higher dimensions… drove Dobermann mad?”
“I’m saying there are clues to be found in The Implicate Topology of Complex Numbers. Clues that form a trail two of my students have, over the years, tried to follow. I can’t erase the clues. Only time can do that. When I am dead as well as forgotten, and the last copy of my book has mouldered on some dusty shelf of some obscure library, then mankind will be safe from the secret.”
“Mankind?”
“Is worth protecting from its own folly. Wouldn’t you say?”
“I’d say it depends who’s doing the protecting. And why.”
“I am, Harry. As to why, I found reason enough at Princeton in the fifties. First there was Oppenheimer, willing nay, eager to confess what it felt like to have placed immense destructive power in the hands of his fellow humans. Remember what he said at the time. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Well, he meant it. He had known sin, he told me. He had brought evil to life. From a single atom of uranium. If we’d sat here a century ago and I’d told you a glob of matter no larger than a grapefruit could lay waste half of Suffolk, you’d have said it was what was your word? madness. But that madness became the linchpin of this country’s defence strategy. And MAD was the acronym used to describe it.
Then there was Einstein, who’d paved the way for the atom-smashers fifty years before with the chilling simplicity of the equation he’s universally remembered for. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. With that, he laid the fuse for Oppenheimer to ignite. And he too recoiled from the consequences.
“I became a regular afternoon caller at Einstein’s office, ostensibly because he valued my contribution to his work on unified field theory. Actually, he wanted an audience for his doubts about the desirability of scientific progress. And he was shrewd enough to sense that I needed to be warned. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had proved to his satisfaction that the human consequences of scientific inquiry are always incalculable and are never as positive as the scientist predicts. His biographers generally interpret the inconclusive nature of his work on unified field theory as evidence of his mental decline in old age, but I suspect he may have deliberately dragged his feet. And may have picked holes in quantum theory for much the same reason. He feared a widening gap between knowledge and the moral maturity of mankind. And he foresaw disaster if the gap was not narrowed.
“I’ve no doubt Einstein was right. Some discoveries are best avoided. Or delayed. Or hidden. Carl’s disintegration proved that and I wish for no more compelling illustration. I’ve published nothing on the subject of higher dimensions since The Implicate Topology of Complex Numbers. I’ve taught only what others can teach. It has not been easy. I’ve often craved recognition and reward for what I’ve achieved, though with age such cravings -like most others have diminished. If I were a man, I might have given way. But women take a broader view. I’ve held my tongue and my brain in check. And my reward is freedom from the guilt that troubled Einstein and Oppenheimer and their fellow physicists who lived in the shadow of the mushroom cloud.
“You’ll think it odd that I should claim to feel no guilt in view of what I’m about to tell you. But it’s true. I’ve examined my conscience and am clear on the point. What I did had to be done. The sin would have been to do nothing. To while away my days here and let the next generation grapple with the consequences. It was tempting, believe me. I wanted none of this. But it had to be.”
“None of whatT
“Murder, in the strict legal definition. I’ve murdered three men. And your son was one of them.”
“You admit that?”
“Would there be any point denying it?”
“But… whyT
“I’ve told you why. Like Carl, David saw the true significance of my work. But much more clearly. His intellect was equal to the task. And piercing enough to see through my concealments. I can follow his progress in these notebooks, edging ever closer over a decade and m
ore. The wrong turnings and the false hopes. But also the slow advances, the brilliant intuitions and the flashes of pure genius. Till in the latest of them he was only a few short steps behind me.
“When he came here last September, it was to proclaim his discoveries and to unveil his plans for HYDRA. I tried to preach caution to him, but he wouldn’t listen. He already saw himself as the founder of a new scientific generation of the hyper-dimensionally aware. He was terribly convincing. I could see he would make it happen. The promise of funding he’d extorted from Lazenby and the originality of his most recent work would have opened the door. Within his lifespan, mankind would have had to cope with the creation of a powerful elite of hyper-dimensionally trained mathematicians.”
“I thought you said the ability was latent in all of us.”
“So it is. But accessible only to the mathematically gifted. At least to begin with. A beginning that would certainly last several generations. During which those denied such training or intellectually incapable of benefiting from it would inevitably be reduced to a position little short of servitude. David saw none of that, of course. He anticipated only universal prosperity and the general advancement of the species. My fears were dismissed with the confidence and the myopia of youth. I was left with no alternative. To safeguard the future, I had to act. In short, I had to stop him. And there was only one way to do it.”
“You killed him? Because of the effect his work might have had on the future?”
“Would have, for certain. He didn’t suffer, Harry. I made sure of that. He was sleeping. Dreaming, perhaps, of the better world he fondly supposed his discoveries would usher in. A dream he never woke from. It’s as generous a fate as any of us can hope for.”
“You call two months on life support… gene rousT
“I call it a tragic misfortune. It was never my intention that his life should have such a pointless epilogue. I left a DO NOT DISTURB sign on his door that was evidently removed. Who knows why or by whom? If it had gone on hanging there… But we are all, including me, the playthings of chance. And of our own mis judgements
Out of the Sun Page 31
