“Are you all right, Rodge? It worked, you know. It was weird. There were two of you! What did it feel like?”
I stood up and opened the door to join him outside the cage.
“Look, Mike, can we talk about it in a moment? I need to do it again, but further this time—out of the cage and into the lab. It’s just too difficult inside the cage: the visuals from the two positions are overlapping and it’s terribly confusing. If I could get a completely different viewpoint I’d be able to make a better assessment.”
He looked a bit chagrined that I wasn’t more forthcoming, but it really wasn’t easy to put into words at this stage. I took a tape-measure out of a drawer and gave it to Mike to hold. He stood with it, next to the cage, and I stretched it out to the point in the room I wanted him to project me to. The distance was six metres. I squatted on my heels briefly to get a rough idea of what I’d see from the new position and fixed that in my mind. Then I retracted the tape-measure.
“Okay, Mike. Bring up the volts on that “–OH” power supply now, to give it a chance to settle.”
He went over to the control panel while I got out my laptop. I put up the graph of distance against energy and started to calculate the new settings.
Mike said, “Right, done that. What about the dollop?”
“I’m just doing it… all right, got it now. First notch on the voltage, and set the duration to three hundred and sixty milliseconds.”
“Gotcha.”
Mike busied himself making the necessary adjustments and I went back into the cage and took up my position on the chair. I didn’t have to face ahead, or anything like that, so I watched his movements. I saw him flip the lever switches for the capacitors, heard the multiple whine as they charged up. Then he went over to the slider controls and brought up the power again. He checked the lights and flipped back the lever switches to stop the capacitors charging.
“All set here, Rodge.”
“Right. Same again, Mike. I’ll signal if I want you to stop the resonance. Otherwise keep it going for two minutes and then stop it anyway.”
“Understood.”
I gave him a thumbs-up to show I was ready.
“Here we go, then.”
The circuit breaker went clonk.
Straight away I knew something had gone wrong.
18
I’d assembled a picture in my mind of what to expect, but when the circuit breaker went clonk it wasn’t at all the way I’d imagined. I could feel a breeze on my face and cool air tingling in my nostrils, and I was aware of grass all around me. I must have panicked, because my heart was hammering in my ears. I had to force myself to think rationally.
The settings must have been wrong, that much was clear. I hadn’t thought we could be that far out, but perhaps there was something I’d overlooked. Maybe there was a mass dependence in the equation—after all, I was a lot heavier than anything we’d used before.
My first worry was how Mike would react when he saw I hadn’t projected inside the room. He’d see only one of me, so he might think it hadn’t worked. But he was probably smart enough to realize I’d projected too far. If he was over-anxious he’d detune and power down straight away. If he kept his head, he’d keep looking out for my signal and waiting for the time to elapse. Either way, I told myself, I’d be back in the cage inside two minutes, so I might as well relax.
Feeling calmer, I started to take a closer interest in my sensations.
The visual impressions were the most confusing. I was looking across a grassy area towards some trees. Behind the trees there was a street and beyond that some tall buildings. The message was “You’re in the open air”, yet at the same time I had the conflicting sensation of being enclosed, of shadows and angular shapes over and around me. I realized my brain was trying to reconcile two different views: the view from wherever I’d been projected to, and the view I still had of the inside of the cage. It was like pausing to look into the interior of a shop when the window is reflecting things going on in the street behind you. In that situation, if you concentrate hard you can shut out the reflections and start to see into the shop, whereas if you concentrate on the reflections of people walking by on the pavement and cars in the road you become less aware of the inside of the shop. By using that technique and concentrating hard I gradually suppressed more and more the angular shadows and the claustrophobic feelings that went with them. As I did so the open-air scene became sharper and more real. I looked around me.
I was in a square, one of those oases of green you find all over central London. That much was obvious, but which one? It looked vaguely familiar but to find out I’d have to cross over to the corner of the street beyond the trees so that I could read the street name. Something inside was telling me to get on with it, but I couldn’t move. I had this overpowering feeling that I had to stay glued to the chair in case Mike returned it and me to the cage. The sensible thing, I thought, would be to take it in easy stages, and try a walkabout next time. But then I thought: How can you be sure there’s going to be a second time? You don’t know what happened to get you out here this time. It might have been a freak combination that you can’t repeat. I recalled the incident with the spider and the shattered glass and told myself firmly that it didn’t matter how far I wandered from the chair; as soon as the resonance was broken, both the chair and I would return to our related points inside the cage. All the same, I hadn’t entirely convinced myself. These distances were much greater than anything we’d tried in the lab. Suppose I was wrong and suppose I was on the other side of the square when the two minutes were up? Two minutes! I’d forgotten to look at my watch when Mike pressed the button! How much time had I spent just sitting here and thinking about it? Thirty seconds? It could be a lot longer—I really had no idea. I took a deep breath. Enough of this faffing around. Do it.
I couldn’t just get up and walk; I had to be really sure that my counterpart in the cage didn’t get up and walk at the same time. Otherwise he could bump into something and hurt himself; more importantly, he could move outside the coverage of the antenna array, and that could be really serious. So I started by studying the ground under my feet. The grass was still shifting and alternating with the floor of the cage. I concentrated on the grass until that became stable. Then I let my awareness extend from the grass to my feet, and from my feet to my legs, focusing on the sensations that told me that my legs were connected to my feet, and that my feet were planted firmly on the grass. Then I simply stood up. I was fairly sure that the movement had been confined to my projected body. I now felt quite anchored in the new environment; almost nothing remained to me of the cage. I walked quickly over to the corner of the square and read the enamelled plaque on the corner building. Innisfree Square. Of course! It was just on the other side of Museum Road; I’d once visited an acquaintance in a hall of residence here.
Suddenly everything swam and I was back in the cage, sitting on the chair. The angular frame of the cage, which had haunted my vision moments earlier, was now sharp and solid all around me. There was a distant clamouring that quickly got louder. It was a voice, Mike’s voice.
“Rodge! Rodge? Are you okay? Are you all right?”
Was I all right? It seemed I was. Feelings of exhilaration and relief started to well up inside me. I’d been on the other side of the square when he’d returned me, but here I was, in the cage again, sitting on the chair! It had worked!
“I’m fine, Mike. Don’t worry. I’m all right.”
“Are you sure? Jeez, that was the longest two minutes of my life. First off I thought nothing had happened. There were supposed to be two of you, one in the cage and one over there, but all I could see was the one in the cage. Then you didn’t get up or anything so I figured it must have worked after all. Where on earth did you disappear to?”
I tried to sound nonchalant.
“Actually I’ve been outside, enjoying the fresh air.”
He looked at me and blinked.
“You we
nt through the cage and the wall of the building? Bloody hell! Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes, yes, I told you, I’m fine.”
He had the cage door open. I got up a little unsteadily and followed him out.
“Look,” I said, “shall we just check the settings before we go any further?”
The moment we did I saw what had gone wrong. The duration was set correctly but the voltage was on the second step, not the first. I pointed to it. Realization dawned on Mike’s face.
“You said ‘first notch on the voltage’. I thought you meant first click up! Oh God, I’m sorry.”
“It’s my fault. I should have made myself clearer. Well, no harm done. In fact, it’s put us way ahead of the game. You did well to wait out the two minutes, Mike. It’s just lucky I didn’t end up in the middle of Kensington High Street.”
His eyebrows flicked up as he took the point. Then he looked thoughtful.
“Suppose you had, and a car knocked you down and killed you. Would you be still be okay when we returned you to the cage?”
“Well, I suppose if it was only physical damage, yes. If there was a great shard of metal stuck through me I… look, why are we discussing this? We have to see to it that it won’t happen. We have to be much more precise in future. We need to be able to predict just how far I’m projected at any given power setting.”
“So where exactly did you end up? Do you know?”
“Yes. Innisfree Square.”
“That’s… what, half a mile away?’
“Less. We need a large scale map so we can measure it. I wish we could be more precise—I’m not even sure within twenty metres whereabouts in the Square I landed.”
For a moment both of us were lost in thought. We needed a way of measuring those distances more accurately. Mike came up with the answer, and it was so obvious I don’t know why I didn’t think of it first.
“GPS!” he exclaimed. “A quality handheld global positioning system receiver. The new ones are good to a metre. Blackstones in Fulham would have them—you know, the camping, expedition, and mountaineering place. Shouldn’t set us back too much. Don’t worry,” he added, seeing the expression on my face, “I’ll lay out.”
There wasn’t any point in doing more experiments until we’d got that sorted, so we powered down the equipment and went back to his flat. He wanted to know in great detail everything I’d experienced. I did my best to describe it to him, but of course it wasn’t easy to convey something like that. Still, he could share my excitement. We’d taken a big leap forward. We’d planned to take it step by step: showing I could be projected without ill effects, showing I could be projected through the wall, again without ill effects, and showing I could move around at the other end and still be brought back to the cage as before. And we’d done all three in one fell swoop.
Mike had a tutorial next morning but he went down to Fulham straight after that and came back to the lab with a couple of plastic carrier bags. He was beaming all over his face as he showed me what he’d bought.
In the first carrier bag was a box containing a portable GPS receiver.
“It’s the most accurate model they stock,” he enthused, as he removed it from its packing. “The guy in the shop gave me the de luxe tour. It’s stacked with features. What really sold it to me is the built-in memory. It means you don’t have to note down readings: you can just store them. There’s an electronic compass, too. I suppose we won’t need that, though.”
“No. If we want to, we can work out the direction from the reading we take outside and the reading in the cage. As well as the distance, of course.”
“Ah, distance. Now, look at this.”
He opened the other carrier bag and took out a colourful cardboard box.
“Ta-dah!” he sang triumphantly. “Software. This is a pretty versatile package. Pilots use it for navigation. And…”
He delved into the bag and came out with a map.
“I went to the stationers on the High Street. It’s the largest scale sheet map of London I could find.”
“Excellent, Mike. Well done!”
We pinned the map to the wall and marked a blue spot in Innisfree Square, our first destination outside the lab.
As soon as we’d done that, we walked over to Innisfree Square with the GPS receiver and I tried to locate the place where I’d landed the day before. I was vaguely hoping to find the impressions left by the chair legs but either the grass had sprung back or I wasn’t in exactly the right place. We recorded the position anyway and stored the coordinates in the receiver. Then we went back to the lab.
To calculate the distance we needed to take a GPS reading at my chair inside the cage. I couldn’t get a good fix from there because the cage was shielding the receiver from the satellite transmissions, so I moved to one side of it and recorded the position there instead. I got out my laptop and we loaded the new navigation software. We’d soon worked out, between us, how to use it to calculate the straight-line distance between two sets of GPS coordinates at our latitude. Strictly speaking it was a geodesic line rather than a straight line, but over this sort of distance the error would be negligible.
Still on the laptop, I brought up our graph of distance against energy setting. It had a cluster of dots on it for each projection we’d made inside the lab. Now I could add the new data from Innisfree Square. The dot sat on its own, well up and to the right of the others. We looked at the pattern made by the dots.
“Looks to me like they could all lie on a straight line,” Mike offered.
“We need longer projections to be certain. Also I need to project back to Innisfree Square to check that position. It’s only approximate at the moment. We’re getting there, Mike. We just have to put a bit more work in, that’s all.”
19
By now I was well settled into Mike’s flat. Up to the time I’d moved in with him all our interaction had been in the college. Now, seeing the way he managed his personal life, I couldn’t help but be impressed. I’m used to being ahead of everyone else academically, but I suppose I can be a bit unworldly when it comes to the basic skills of living. Mike is just the opposite; he’s a master of survival. He’s a more than passable cook and beyond that he’s a fund of common sense on all sorts of matters. In fact he seems to be able to cope with every practical situation that life can throw at you—except one: strangely his street-wise instincts seem to desert him when it comes to dealing with women. In this respect, at least, I had the advantage, but then I’ve had a first class grounding in that department. It would be ungallant to go into too much detail. Let me just say that when I was sixteen my mother took me with her on a visit to some friends in France. I was a good-looking and precociously mature teenager, and I was quickly adopted by a circle of bored married women and divorcees who, unknown to my mother, took a close interest in my further education. That experience gave me a confidence with the opposite sex that has never left me, and in some way I think women sense it.
The moment I clapped eyes on Suzy I could see that poor old Mike was way out of his depth. She was a pretty little thing, all right, and I could see why he was so smitten. The trouble was, he just didn’t know how to manage her. He wasn’t so much shy as deferent, polite and anxious to please, whereas it was obvious to me that what she needed was a firm hand, excitement and a bit of action. I declined his offer of dinner that night, although I hadn’t in fact eaten already, because I would have had to say how good it was and I didn’t want to build him up further in Suzy’s eyes. I thought it would be all right to accept a glass of wine. I was fairly offhand with Suzy on that first meeting, figuring that it would pique her interest, and obviously it did.
Over the next few weeks we started to go out as a threesome, usually to have dinner. I think the suggestion came from Suzy. I don’t think Mike was all that keen, as he wanted her to himself, and that worked against him because he would end up on one side of the table looking sullen while Suzy and I would be on the other side, e
njoying ourselves. And naturally there would be times when she or I would exchange some comment that he couldn’t hear, and we would laugh and he would think we were having fun at his expense and give us a hard look. At the end of the evening Suzy always went home on her own and we went back to the flat. Nothing more would be said about it, although he was usually pretty quiet. I’m sure he felt uncomfortable about me and Suzy.
*
Apart from the minor complication of Suzy, things went on very much as before. Even if Mike had been a bit sulky the previous evening he’d be as enthusiastic as ever when he joined me in the lab the following afternoon. We kept adding to our toll of projections, gradually working further and further out. We always chose an open space, like a park or square, partly because it would be less dangerous but mainly because my sudden arrival would be less conspicuous. I did away with the chair for the same reason. We would identify the site on the map and then one or other of us would get on a bus and go to it with the GPS receiver and take a reading. Then back at the lab we’d calculate the energy we thought we needed, based on all the data we had up to that point, and I would allow myself to be projected there, carrying the GPS receiver with me. When I arrived I could check the coordinates and see how far out we were. Gradually the number of blue spots on the map of London increased, and with it the number of dots on the graph in my laptop. After doing this for three weeks or so it seemed a good time to take stock, so we sat down together with the laptop in front of us.
I pointed to the screen.
“The graph’s a straight line out to about here.”
“What is that in terms of distance?”
“About a mile. After that it curves over. That means you need more and more energy for each increase in distance.”
The Man in Two Bodies (British crime novel): A Dark Science Crime Caper Page 10
