The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space
Page 17
She comes and stands by the machine again, and he stands next to her. They gaze through the glass.
‘Wouldn’t it be good if there was never any glass to get in the way?’ He doesn’t know which one of them says this, the words are in his head.
When he gets home the house is still empty but there’s a note waiting for him in the kitchen, propped up against an empty beer can. It’s just one sentence:
CAN YOU EVEN REMEMBER MY NAME?
He screws up the piece of paper and throws it outside into the dark garden.
She’s gone. She’s not at the back of the lab, her notebook has disappeared and nobody seems to know anything. Lucy’s still away so he’s rushed off his feet all day, but everywhere he goes in the lab is saturated with the memories of her. Outside the winter sunlight is bright and sharp so the double helix is casting word-shadows everywhere, but she’s not here to catch them. Perhaps he imagined her. Perhaps she never was.
The Prof wants to have a talk about the flies. He’s not happy; the company won’t refund the money for the flies because it wasn’t their fault, and Lucy can’t come back to work here until every last one of the mutant flies has been found and destroyed. He suggests that maybe this should take priority over setting up the new machine and he reminds the Gaffer who is really in charge here. He doesn’t even call him the Gaffer, he calls him by his name.
After everyone’s left the lab at the end of the day, the Gaffer remains, sitting by the console and programming the machine. He’s learning how to get deep into the guts of its system, so he can disable the safety features. Now the lab is dark and he can just about see the glass canopy rise up, revealing the workings. He gets up and lays his hand on one of the beds, waiting for the sharp metal tips to do what they’ve been instructed to do. It will be a beautiful ending.
Further information
Some of the stories in this collection were inspired by historical people and events:
The first star
In 1913 the campaign for votes for women was at its height and in May of that year the Royal Observatory Edinburgh was bombed by suffragettes, damaging the West Tower. Visitors to the Observatory can see a small fragment of the bomb. The perpetrators were never caught and it’s not clear what the precise motive for this attack was. But it may have had something to do with the Observatory’s short-lived practice of employing female ‘computers’ (the term used for people who, before mechanical computers were developed, carried out routine processing of data), and these women were always paid less than their male counterparts.
The Snow White paradox
Alan Turing first concieved of his test of artificial intelligence as essentially gender-based and this was inspired by an old parlour game, the ‘imitation game’. The ‘Snow White’ record player as described in the story is real but here it is an anachronism because Braun, the manufacturers, didn’t put it on sale until 1956. Turing always had a fascination with the story of Snow White. The first major biography of Turing (‘Enigma’ by Andrew Hodges) agrees with the inquest that Turing’s death was definitely suicide; later biographers such as B. Jack Copeland (author of ‘Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age’) seem less convinced.
Heroes and cowards
Brecht’s play ‘Life of Galileo’ was first written in 1938 and then substantially rewritten during his stay in Hollywood in collaboration with the actor Charles Laughton, who played the title role in the world premiere of the English-language version. The earlier version of the play depicts Galileo as a typically Brechtian anti-hero who is prepared to do anything to double-cross the Roman Catholic church to get his message across. But after the Manhattan project culminated in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Brecht wanted to update the play to show how Galileo failed to stand up to the Inquisition and thus (in his view) set a bad example for all future scientists in their dealings with authorities.
This story uses quotes from Brecht’s actual evidence to HUAC. Oppenheimer’s line, ‘Sorry, no I can’t say that I am,’ is also taken from real life and was in response to a journalist asking him if he felt sorry for the use of the atom bomb. Oppenheimer did receive many awards for his work but the award ceremony in the story is entirely fictional.
Furthest South
There are several ongoing experiments to detect neutrinos based at the Antarctic. Scott’s expedition of 1910-12 had many scientific purposes, and one of those was to collect eggs from emperor penguins wintering at Cape Crozier to provide possible evidence that the embryos were more ‘primitive’ than the fully grown penguins and therefore might provide a link between reptiles and birds. The appallingly difficult trek to obtain some eggs is vividly recounted in Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s book ‘The Worst Journey in the World’. This book also describes how the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers were buried where they were found. There is a large wooden cross commemorating Scott and the men who died on that fatal expedition, but I’ve taken liberties with its location, it’s actually situated at Hut Point on the edge of the continent and not near the Pole.
The equation for an apple
In 1924 J. Robert Oppenheimer travelled from Harvard to Cambridge to start his PhD in physics. But he wasn’t happy there, something clearly went badly wrong and he tried to poison his PhD supervisor Patrick Blackett with an apple dipped in cyanide. This episode was subsequently hushed up by his family and the University authorities, and Oppenheimer went on to carry out his PhD work at Göttingen with Max Born. See ‘American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer’ by Bird and Sherwin, and ‘Inside The Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer’ by Ray Monk for more information.
That sinking feeling
In the 1980s it was discovered that Einstein and his first wife Mileva Marić had had a baby before they got married. The fate of this child is not known, but it is possible she either died of scarlet fever or was adopted by friends. Einstein didn’t actually live in the same apartment block as Elsa while he was still married to Mileva – that is my own thought experiment. Walter Isaacson’s biography ‘Einstein: His Life and Universe’ is an excellent source of information.
Einstein’s thought experiment in which a man in a freefalling lift experiences weightlessness was an important aspect of the development of general relativity. The words ‘gravity’ and ‘grief’ are etymologically related.
Acknowledgments
Some of these stories have already been published as different versions:
‘Introduction to relativity’
in ‘New Writers Awards 2012: Scottish Book Trust’
‘Identity theft’
on the Human Genre Project website
‘The competition for immortality’
on Lablit (http://www.lablit.com)
‘Furthest South’
on CulturBooks (http://www.culturbooks.de)
‘The need for better regulation of outer space’
in Fractured West, volume 5
‘The voice-activated lift’
in The Scotsman
‘No numbers’
was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as part of the Shorts: Scottish Shorts series in January 2015
I’m very grateful to Andrew Crumey for acting as a mentor and providing advice and feedback on these stories as they were being written. I’d also like to thank the Scottish Book Trust for giving me a New Writers Award in 2012, and the School of Physics and Astronomy in the University of Edinburgh for letting me have office space during 2013. I’m grateful to the Hawthornden Trust for a Fellowship in January 2014 which helped me complete this collection. At Freight, Adrian Searle, Robbie Guillory and my editor Karen Campbell have helped me with huge amounts of guidance and support.
Over the past few years I’ve learnt lots about universes, galaxies, meteor/ites, genes, fruit flies and Antarctic exploration in conversations with Andy Lawrence, Bob Mann, Andy Taylor (who told me about the human computers at the Observatory), John Peacock, Ken Rice, Mar Carmena (who showed me her fruit flies)
, Lorraine Kerr (who introduced me to Armstrong the liquid-dispensing robot), Jenny Rohn, Anne Strathie, Ken MacLeod, Pedro Ferreira and Marek Kukula. Phillip Helbig gave me feedback on a number of points. Of course, any remaining mistakes are entirely my own responsibility.
As ever my lovely writing pals, particularly Mary Paulson-Ellis, Theresa Muñoz, Sophie Cooke, John Ward and Zoë Beck have all supplied feedback, good cheer, distraction and much appreciated emails.
My family Graeme Busfield, Herb Goldschmidt (who told me about Granny and the three stones) and Belle Brett are endlessly patient and supportive. Louie provided a lot of fur.