He pointed to a box on the wall.
“Oh, okay.”
Ask a silly question… the box was the size of a four-drawer filing cabinet.
“Right, that’s about it for the equipment. All right so far?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Good. Let’s have a little demonstration, then.”
He went over to the side of the lab and returned holding a glass beaker with some water in it.
“Open the cage. We’ll put it in there.”
He placed it carefully in the middle of the table and came out. I shut the cage door.
He disappeared over to the side of the lab again. When he came back he was carrying two pairs of plastic-framed safety spectacles. He handed one pair to me. The lenses had a bluish tinge. My eyebrows must have asked the question.
“You won’t see anything, because none of it’s in the visible spectrum. But there’s still a lot of energy and the cage won’t filter out all the infra-red that’s bouncing around. It makes sense to protect your eyes.”
I put them on. It was the only safety precaution I’d seen him take, so I wasn’t in a mood to argue.
He didn’t stand over me; he took a chair and sat off to one side. I appreciated that. It made me less nervous and gave me a better chance to learn the ropes. I saw him glance at his watch.
“I think that’s enough time,” he said. “Start charging the capacitor bank.”
Mentally, I was still feeling my way. Capacitor bank, I thought. That’s on the right. I reached out and flipped the first of the lever switches. The red light above it went on and I heard a faint high-pitched rising sound. It was probably an inverter, stepping up the voltage somewhere. I flipped the next switch; another rising sound. I worked quickly down the row of lever switches, and now there was a row of red lights and a curious little choir of rising voices.
“Right. Now start to bring up the radiated power. Slowly.”
Um, the radiated power. That’ll be the slider switches. I moved over to the left and used my fingers to push the sliders forward, taking it slowly. I glanced up because something had caught my eye. Just above the cage the big conductor cables came down from the ceiling and you could see them easily in the light from the fluorescent bank. There was a bit of condensation on the outside of the cables—I suppose that wasn’t surprising with all the damp in here. But now the condensation was receding all along them and what had caught my eye was a line of steam coming off the cables. I moistened my lips. Okay, I was a bit nervous. So would you be. It wasn’t so long ago they were using electric furnaces to melt metal in this lab. Those cables were carrying the same sort of current now.
The sliders were at the end of their travel. My skin was prickling. I knew it was silly but it seemed to me like the very air in the room was quivering with electricity. I tried to control my voice.
“Okay. We’re on full power.”
“Charging status?”
I glanced over to the right. The green lights had been going on. For each red light there was now a green light. Full house, I thought.
“All charged.”
“Good. Turn off the charging circuits now. You don’t want the capacitors recharging after you’ve pushed the button.”
I flipped the row of lever switches back down. As each one clicked over its red light went out, but the green light stayed on. The capacitors were holding the charge. Beautiful.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Can you see the beaker inside the cage all right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Get your finger on the red button, watch the beaker carefully and press the button.”
I swallowed hard, found the button. Focused on the beaker with the water. I didn’t want to blink at the wrong time. I pressed the button.
I heard a satisfying clonk from the four-drawer filing cabinet. That was all. I looked until my eyes ached. Nothing.
“Did you see it?”
“No.”
“What, nothing at all?”
“No, nothing.” I turned to him. “I’m sorry, Rodge. It didn’t look to me as if anything happened.”
He got up and glanced into the cage.
“Something’s wrong. Bring the radiated power down.”
I moved the sliders right back. I left the power supplies themselves switched on. I looked at Rodge, but he was talking thoughtfully, half to himself.
“Maybe one of the frequencies is off tune. It only takes one…”
There was a familiar fizzing, crackling sound—arcing! Both our heads snapped round and I saw the wisp of blue smoke coming from one of the boxes on the side of the cage.
Rodge started to say “Kill the supplies” but I was already flipping all the left-hand switches to the off position. We went over to the device. Rodge sniffed at the cooling vents and wrinkled his nose. Frying electronics have an acrid smell all of their own. I could smell it from where I was standing.
“Well I suppose that explains it,” he said. “It must have been unstable during the run, and now it’s decided to cook properly.”
“The radiated power was right down, Rodge. Do they take that much power in standby?”
“Very little. No, it wasn’t an overload.” He gave a short laugh. “Don’t worry—if one of the radiated power circuits had been involved you’d be picking yourself off the floor right now. No, I think it was a capacitor in the EHT circuit. They’re not as well specified as they should be. It only takes a pinhole in the dielectric and they arc over. It’s not the first time. I’ll have to strip it down and replace the capacitor.”
“Can I help?”
“No, not really. I have to wait anyway; there could still be several thousand volts on it—it takes a while to dissipate. I’ll fix it tomorrow. It’s probably just the capacitor,” he said, thinking out loud, “but it may just have taken something else with it. Damn. That’s quite an old supply so I may have to go on the scrounge for the components.” He turned to me. “Look, maybe it’s best if we leave it tomorrow, Mike. Let’s see, what’s today? Wednesday. Give me Thursday to get it fixed and come back Friday. It should be all right by then and we can carry on where we left off.”
“Well, if you’re sure you don’t need any help.”
“Yes, yes. Don’t worry about it. This sort of thing happens.”
As I was leaving he said to me quietly:
“You could say there’s a plus side to this. You’ve proved your worth, Mike.”
I was surprised and a bit embarrassed, especially as I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. I started to say, “What, because I cut the volts…?”
He interrupted me. “No, more important than that. You didn’t see what didn’t happen.”
I frowned and waited for him to elaborate.
“Some people’s egos are so tied up with what they’re doing they end up seeing only what they want to see. You, on the other hand, are totally objective. You always were. When we used to do those practicals as undergraduates you always had to be convinced of everything. That’s good. That’s going to be very useful.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to. Our eyes met. We understood each other.
8
Okay, so things had gone wrong. It happens. Research wouldn’t be research if things always worked. That made it more interesting, not less.
The incident reminded me of something that happened in a practical class during our first year as physics undergraduates. Everyone seemed to have got the result except us. I went over to the demonstrator, all crestfallen. He had a careful look at the figures in my lab notebook and then he straightened up. I thought he was going to tell me what a tool I was, or say “go and do it again”. Instead he congratulated me on my golden opportunity. “Just because your observations don’t agree with everyone else’s it doesn’t mean they’re wrong,” he said. “But what you’re seeing is different from what they’re seeing. So in what way is it different and why? If you can answer that you’ll learn mo
re from this one experiment than from a whole practical course that went without a hitch. We learn most when things don’t go the way we expect them to.” I know it cheered me up no end at the time, although it took a lot longer for the message to really sink in. I think he was only a postdoc himself. I hope he’s a professor now; that was a bloody good thing to say to a first-year undergraduate.
Of course I thought a bit about Rodge’s experiment afterwards but I can’t say it bothered me. I mean, I didn’t expect it to work in the first place so it wasn’t that much of a surprise. I could see how it would annoy Rodge, though, because he’d set it all up for me and predicted what was going to happen. I knew from the debating incident that he didn’t like to fail, least of all in front of an audience. Even an audience of one.
I went to my tutorial in the morning and after lunch I walked down to my bank. There are closer banks but all of us in First Year Physics, including Rodge and myself, had opened an account at this one on Cromwell Road. The reason was simple. This bank didn’t have a branch on campus so it offered really competitive deals to attract the students. During Fresher’s Week word got around they were offering interest-free loans for the duration of our three-year course. It turned out to be true. Everyone in my year signed up. The Manager was all right, too; very flexible. He’s not there any more: maybe they thought he’d been too easy and moved him on or gave him the old boot. Anyway, I’ve moved several times since the course but I’ve kept my account at Cromwell Road so you could say their policy worked; it got them my business—for what that’s worth.
I was going down there this afternoon to withdraw some more cash. To be honest that was only an excuse. There was a girl who worked there as a teller. Her name was Susan— I hadn’t asked her; it was the name on the badge she wore. I don’t know whether it was all that heavy chestnut hair, or the brown eyes that always seemed to be sparkling with amusement, or that low, teasy voice of hers, but she’d really got to me. I was dying to take her out, but how on earth could I manage it when the only place I ever saw her in was the bank? It wasn’t like bumping into her at a club or a party or something. Girls are in social mode then: they expect to meet new people. But if you do the same thing when they’re at work they consider it an unwelcome advance. And in a bank—well, she’d probably call the Security Guard and have me escorted out.
So I cooked up a little plan. My idea was to visit the bank regularly. If I made enough transactions we’d naturally enough start to pass the time of day, and it would lead to something more. That was the theory and that was why I was withdrawing small amounts of cash two or three times a week. Strictly speaking, I suppose I should have been using one of the ATMs on the outside wall, but if you don’t want to do that the staff don’t usually ask you why. So I’d turn up at the counter, and I’d give her my cheque book, and she’d ask me how I wanted the cash, and I’d tell her, and she’d give me back the cheque book and the money. That was all. It wasn’t working. Our bank still had the old partitions and that made it even harder. How can you strike up a casual conversation with a sheet of glass between you? I realized I was going to have to make it happen, and that made me feel very uncomfortable. I’m a bit shy when it comes to girls, and of course that only made it harder. A girl like that, she could probably spot a chat-up line from a hundred paces. And she probably had a boyfriend already, although at least she wasn’t wearing a ring. I know: I looked.
I decided it was now or never. I deliberately chose a slack time of day, just after the lunch-time rush, because I didn’t want too many other customers around. I didn’t know if she’d be on duty, so I scanned the counter quickly as soon as I walked through the door. I was in luck; there were two tellers on, and she was one of them. The trouble was, she was dealing with an elderly lady and the other teller didn’t have anyone to attend to. It was going to look mighty strange if I started to form a queue when there was an empty counter right next to me. I went over to a shelf on one side of the bank and pretended to be filling in my cheque book. I waited there until another customer came through the door. Of course they went straight to the vacant position and I promptly joined the queue for Susan, standing behind the old lady. But at that very moment the old lady said “Thank you, dear”, clicked her handbag shut and moved off and I found myself at the counter without even a moment to gather my thoughts. Susan looked up with a quick, professional smile.
“Hi,” she said pleasantly.
I smiled back as winningly as I could and dropped my cheque book and banker’s card into the scoop. She swivelled it her way. She tore the cheque out and scribbled something and I knew she was about to ask how I wanted to have the cash so I swallowed hard and took my chance. There was no one behind me, but I lowered my voice anyway.
“Could I have two tens and two fives and what time do you get off work because I’d like to take you for a coffee.”
I had to get it all out in one; if I’d stopped I’d have seized up totally. Then I held my breath, prepared to become the most miserable young man in South Kensington, possibly the world.
She stopped dead for an instant, and lowered and raised thick eyelashes.
“Two tens and two fives,” she repeated. “And I believe there was something else, which I didn’t quite catch.”
I tried to sound engaging. Actually I can do engaging.
“Please don’t make me say it again. It took all my courage to get it out the first time.”
She glanced to her right to see if the conversation was being overheard, but the other teller was still dealing with her customer. She looked straight up at me. Her eyes were very dark and solemn, but her voice still had that teasy quality that made things go buzz-buzz inside me.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I’m deadly serious. I want to take you for a coffee.”
“Just a coffee?”
Apart from giving herself thinking time, I knew what she meant. I chose to ignore the innuendo.
“Well,” I said brightly, “I could run to a Danish if you fancy something with it.”
She tried to suppress the smile but she couldn’t manage it entirely. God, I thought, she has dimples too! She glanced again at my cheque book to register the name. Then she dropped it, and the cash, into the scoop, and sat up primly, her slim hands on the desk in front of her.
“All right, Mr. Barrett,” she said suddenly, “quarter past five.”
Like she was making a business appointment.
I couldn’t believe it. I only just stopped myself from thanking her.
“I’ll wait for you outside,” I said quietly, and hurried out before I made a worse fool of myself.
There was a nice cool breeze coming down the street. It made me realize how hot my face was.
9
I made sure I was there before time. It wasn’t difficult; I’d been looking at my watch all afternoon. She came through the door on the dot of quarter past five, wearing a navy suit, with a black handbag over one shoulder. She hadn’t been wearing a jacket in the bank. Now that she was out from behind the counter I could see she was quite petite. That was a relief. I’m not all that tall myself and I wouldn’t have wanted her towering over me. And she wore a skirt, knee-length. That was good too: I feel intimidated by women who wear business suits with trousers. It may sound silly, but it’s that whole “female executive” thing. If I’m looking for a boy-girl relationship I don’t want them to treat me as a management problem.
I stepped up right away.
“Hi,” I said awkwardly.
“Hallo.” Her manner was friendly, but a bit guarded.
“Er, do you have any preference about where to go, or shall I choose?”
“Well, to be frank, Mr. Barrett…”
“Oh, Mike, please. Everyone calls me Mike… Susan. Is it okay if I call you Susan?”
“Suzy. Only my Mum calls me Susan.”
“Oh, right. My Mum calls me Michael.”
We laughed, and then sort of caught ourselves.
“Mike,” she said. “What I wanted to say is, we’ve got a coffee machine in the bank so it’s on tap all day long. If I have any more I’ll overdose on caffeine.”
“Oh.”
I must have looked as crestfallen as I felt.
“There’s a nice wine bar near South Ken’ station. Shall we go there?”
“Great idea,” I said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. Well, I do know. I wouldn’t have wanted to suggest it to you.”
“Well, don’t get the wrong idea. I just thought it would be nice to have a little aperitif instead.”
I was thinking, I can’t seem to say the right thing. It’s like walking through a bloody minefield.
“I’ll pay my way,” she added.
“Oh, no, er—my invitation, my shout.”
It was a relief to set off in the direction of South Kensington. I was thinking of her “Just a coffee?” remark. She should be feeling more relaxed about that now; if I was trying to abduct her I’d be opening the door of an Aston Martin or something. The pavement was crowded, and it was pretty much impossible to walk side by side; mostly I let her lead and I followed. What with this and people pushing past and lorries and buses thundering by and I didn’t even try to keep up a conversation.
Ten minutes later we were at the wine bar. As soon as we got inside the second entrance door the noise of the traffic was suddenly snuffed out. The lighting was low and there was some quiet jazz playing. A group of customers in one corner had quite loud voices so we chose a table well away from them. I sat down opposite her and tried to smile. My chest was fluttering like there was a bird trapped inside it. I’d had the same feeling a couple of times before, when I was waiting for my turn in a viva exam or an interview. It was downright unpleasant then. This was, too, but in an enjoyable sort of way. I knew I ought to be saying something but my mouth seemed to have dried up. Thank goodness the waiter came over quickly and I had a chance to gather my scattered wits. Suzy ordered a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. I just said I’d have the same and he went off. I was sweating a bit from the walk, so I said:
The Man in Two Bodies (British crime novel): A Dark Science Crime Caper Page 5
