Jim had often found bank holidays a nuisance because they crept up unexpectedly and you suddenly found that the department was closed for the day so you could not get access to the photocopiers and the library was not open so you could not search for that interesting reference you had just come across in the scientific paper you were reading...
'What are you doing over the long weekend?' asked Kelvin as they queued as best they could in a cramped room that contained two photocopiers, one of which had 'Out of Order' written in black biro on a sheet of white A4 paper sellotaped across its top. They both moved aside as some people came in to check the mail pigeonholes.
'I haven't given it much thought,' replied Jim, truthfully. 'Ariadne keeps asking if we can go down to the Isle of Wight again. She wants to explore something on the downs we found. But everything seems to take twice as much time as you would expect when you are writing up, though. And she is revising for her finals at the moment. Keeps pressing me though.'
One of the secretaries squeezed past from the only working photocopier and went out of the door by the pigeonholes, into the corridor. Her shoes squeaked on the freshly polished surface. Kelvin moved forward to put his single sheet on top of the glass, aligned its sides carefully with the edges of the plate and closed the lid. He turned to Jim as he set the photocopier running. 'I might go up to Leicester to see Kath,' he said, trying to summon a little enthusiasm for the idea, then turned back in dismay to the sound of copying repeating itself and hammered a frantic tattoo with his forefinger on the clear/stop button. The machine took no notice at all. Kelvin gazed forlornly at the counter display as it changed majestically from eighteen to seventeen to sixteen... He hammered the button again. At eight, it stopped.
'Your card has run out,' said Jim.
Jim's soon had as well, despite the ten pounds he had put on it earlier in the week, and as he walked down to the secretaries' office with another ten pounds in his hand, he saw Ron walking towards him. Fortunately, a member of staff quickly engaged Ron in what seemed to be quite an animated conversation as Jim approached and he was able to slip past.
'Have you checked your mail yet?' asked Carl, as Jim entered the lab. 'Cambridge have sent me some new results. I think you might like to see them,' and he handed over some sheets of computer printout.
'They are from some linen off an Egyptian mummy of the nineteenth dynasty. A minor courtier who died in the thirty-sixth year of the reign of Rameses II,' he said, as Jim scanned down one of the sheets.
'They have a sample from the mummy itself,' said Jim in reply. 'Diana was telling me about it the week before last. I dare say that that result will be coming soon.' His eye caught a figure at the bottom of the page.
'Shit!'
'Shit indeed,' agreed Carl. The figure was presented in years BP - before present - but Jim was becoming adroit at this piece of mental arithmetic by now. '897 BC,' he said.
'All my work supports dates for the reign of Rameses II in the fourteenth century BC,' said Carl. 'About three hundred years separates the volcanic eruption of the island of Thera in the southern Aegean and the time of Rameses II. Egyptian records prove this.'
'And you have sixteen thirty-something BC for the eruption,' said Jim.
'1631 BC,' said Carl. They sat in silence for a few seconds.
'So the technique is useless after all,' said Carl, despondently.
·
The weather was quite warm as Ariadne drove Jim down the M4 motorway and across the suspension bridge into Wales. It was the May Bank Holiday weekend and Jim was still desperate to find evidence for contradiction in the historical sciences. Ariadne was being a great source of strength to him. Where he should have been working to find a source of inaccuracy in the method, as the Cambridge team were, he was looking instead for evidence of genuine uncertainty in history. Necessary uncertainty. There was no time to show scientific caution and wait for a thorough investigation to exhaust the less interesting possibilities, still less to believe that these barren, prosaic options held the truth. He sensed the thrill and the danger of being part of a new expansion of knowledge. It was not science that threatened the world but a lack of imagination. Jim could not bring himself to explore what he saw as the boring options first. He had to push forwards, with a determination that bordered on stubbornness and a tenacity that was fast becoming foolhardiness.
Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century described Caerleon as a city and the seat of the newly-founded Christian diocese of Britain during the Roman occupation, but Ariadne thought that archaeology had found only a large Roman fortress there. So Jim was off to investigate.
It made for a nice Saturday out with Ariadne as well, and a break away from their studies.
The village of Caerleon was very pretty, divided by the river Usk, a great mud scar cutting the village somewhat less than picturesquely into two. There were the outlines of Roman barracks to see, concrete swimming pools in a spacious building, and an impressive amphitheatre. The guidebook showed a plan of the fortress, and that was what it seemed to be. They walked along the old defensive wall near the river, part of which was still standing quite high, higher even than the section of Hadrian's Wall Jim had once been to see.
The guidebook explained how the remains of the fortress rested everywhere upon clean, natural ground, undisturbed by earlier buildings. The guidebook, furthermore, made it clear that Isca, the 'City of the Legions' was a fortress and not a town. And unlike York, no Romano-British town had ever grown around it; in fact there was very little Roman civilian activity to be seen at all.
'As this was a huge military centre, controlling all the forts in Wales, they might have appointed an Archbishop anyway,' suggested Ariadne, 'even if there weren't any civilians here.'
'But there is very little evidence of Christianity in the cemeteries of Isca,' Jim objected as he put the book down on the grass beside him. Jim and Ariadne were lying in the sun on one of the sculptured green mounds between the deep passageways leading down into the arena of the amphitheatre. Ariadne took up the guidebook and began to read it. 'There was a lot of building and rebuilding at the corner of the wall we saw down by the river,' she said after a while. 'But nothing seems to have happened to the fortress when history tells us that all the legions in Britain marched down to Gaul to fight Septimus Severus, leaving the country defenseless.'
A cow lowed in a field behind them.
'There is an inscription telling that Titus Flavius Postumius Varus restored the temple of Diana nearby,' she said, and she looked across the well-mown arena towards the grassy banks opposite. 'And this guide says that he was the man who became Urban Prefect of Rome in AD 271. This sends your theory down in flames, doesn't it - if the annals of ancient Rome correlate with an inscription on a stone found buried here?'
'All it says is that a man reached high office in Rome in AD 271 and also restored a temple to Diana in Britain at some other time during his life,' replied Jim. 'Date the backfill in the repaired stone foundations over there and any figure within a period of thirty years would conform to these two bare facts. And if independent dating were to make it impossible that Titas Flavious Postumius Varus could have restored the temple of Diana...'
'Then it might have been restored by another Titus Flavious Postumius Varus,' said Ariadne.
It was a lovely afternoon and Ariadne treated Jim to tea and cakes in a small teashop nearby and then they went to see the Roman Baths. The remains of the pools were protected inside a large roof and from the wooden walkway that guided them around Jim could see deep down into the Roman drains and into swimming baths lined with pink plaster.
'These were for the soldiers,' said Ariadne.
'I wonder if they kept records of repair work,' mused Jim. 'Like that hole that has obviously been plastered over at the bottom of this pool here,' and he pointed down into one of the Frigidarium baths.
'I can tell you how that was done,' said Ariadne.
'You've seen records?'
'No, But my brother worked at these excavations when I was a little girl. He's taken me around before. It was when the archaeologists were clearing all the rubble and roof tile out of this pool. A German teenager hacked through the bottom with his pickaxe. He was six feet six tall and his German friend called him Shorty! The plaster filling that hole can't be more than fifteen years old.'
Jim looked deflated.
'But did Shorty have any choice then?' he asked suddenly. 'When he was bashing into and levering out all that rubble with his pickaxe, I mean? Would his supervisors have been wasting their time if they had been any more vigilant? 'Cos it was going to happen, wasn't it? Look, there is the evidence! He had no choice! Unless... the only way he could have had any choice is if there are different versions of events behind us now, and some of them don't involve Shorty!'
'Only if the future already exists!' replied Ariadne. 'Then either history must be uncertain or there is no free will, I agree. But it doesn't. The future doesn't exist!'
'But it does!'replied Jim. 'Albert Einstein's relativity makes it impossible for two travellers to agree on a present moment! One man's future is another man's past! It already exists!'
Ariadne fell silent.
'Theseus could have forgotten to secure the thread and pulled it along behind him and never found his way out of the Labyrinth!' said Jim, giving his thoughts free rein. 'He could have been trapped in there forever! 'Cos otherwise, if there was no possibility that he could fail, why didn't he stay at home with his feet up and let events take their inevitable course, without him? And that would be stupid, wouldn't it? The world can't be like that!'
'Even if he was to have pulled the tread through,' shouted Ariadne, 'he could have played the thread out again and it would have lead him back to Ariadne! It was the thread of Daedalus, wasn't it! It could lead him wherever he wanted to go! Into the labyrinth! Out of the labyrinth! Back to Ariadne! He would still have found his way out!'
·
A tiny plume of vapour from the liquid nitrogen rose from the stainless steel spectrometer as though in weak imitation of the column of volcanic ash that had smothered and preserved the sample that lay inside. Carl and Jim both sat and watched the screen of a PC to the accompaniment of an early-morning news bulletin on the television in a corner of the laboratory.
Then the phone rang. It was Diana speaking from the Cavendish. 'We are running the sample now,' said Carl. 'We won't have a result for a few hours yet.'
There was a long pause during which Diana was obviously explaining something in some detail, because Carl kept frowning and nodding, and saying yes, and ah-ha, and then smiled and fell into silence again.
'So what do you suggest?' he said at last. There was another long pause.
When the conversation had ended, Carl turned to Jim.
'They ran two samples overnight at the Cavendish and have checked everything they can think of. But my results are confirmed,' and he gave a whoop of delight. 'They get 1631 BC for both samples. This makes over seven hundred years between the eruption of Thera which obliterated the eastern Mediterranean, and the time of the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh Rameses II, for which we now have over a dozen independent dates. The historical record is absolutely unequivocal in insisting on only three hundred years or so between these two periods, so there is something wrong with the technique! There has to be.'
Jim shook his head, but Carl was not to be dissuaded.
'My experimental work is vindicated!' he said, joyfully.
·
'If you are off to this isotope dating seminar at Leeds on Wednesday, shall we organise a TGIF for Friday?' said Jim. 'I'm going down to the Isle of Wight with Ariadne on Saturday, so it would make a nice start to the weekend.' Robert was carefully cutting out a line in a sheet of cardboard with the blade from a Stanley knife. A cardboard rectangle fell from its frame like a child's cut-out toy. He put it in the pile he had collected for the poster he was preparing. 'Okay,' he said.
'MAKE A DATE TGIF.' wrote Jim, in black marker pen on a white sheet of A4 paper, put the date and time underneath, spent five minutes thinking up a mass spectrometer logo to decorate it with, then put it aside to photocopy after lunch. Then he turned back to the scientific paper he was reading.
Robert put another tape into the cassette recorder. 'Are you sure it is okay to have this music on?' he asked.
'Perfectly,' Jim assured him. 'I have always been able to work to music. It probably stems from long mornings in the art room at school.'
By seven o'clock the following Friday, the beer had all been drunk in the Department Common Room and by common agreement the Westside bar had been fixed upon as a venue for toasted sandwiches, before going on to the Amble Inn.
The Amble Inn became so crowded later in the evening that it was impossible to lift a glass of beer to one's lips without knocking someone in the back. While pushing his way to the bar, Jim caught a glimpse of a woman who was sitting in front of a heavy wooden table with some friends and she slipped Jim a friendly glance as he passed as though she knew him. She was dressed in what seemed to be a very expensive, very contour-displaying one-piece knitted dress, designer-made he was sure, and she was stunningly attractive.
'Have you looked any further into Irish legends?' asked Robert when Jim returned to the table they had managed to grab. 'The whole idea of the Otherworld is that it coexists alongside our own,' he explained. 'When the Milesians conquered Ireland, for example, two or three thousand years ago, the people who were there already, the people of the Goddess Dana, did not flee from Ireland but disappeared into a parallel Ireland, where they could be contacted through a mist, or within the inside of a hill, or beneath a lake or the sea.'
'Like Atlantis!' exclaimed Charlotte. 'A land that was once part of the world but is now beneath the ocean. A world similar to our own, but out of reach.'
'Mag Mel,' said Robert, warming to Charlotte's grasp of what he was saying. 'A world that coexists with our own, but entered through a mist, or beneath the waters of a lake.
'When Cormac entered a mist,' Robert continued, 'he came to the house of Manannan and was overjoyed to see his wife and children again. Manannan's consort mischievously gave Cormac a cup that broke if a lie was told and which would miraculously reassemble itself at the utterance of a truth. Manannan then said that Cormac's wife was married to another man, but before Cormac had time to shout and object, the cup broke. Relief! But before he could celebrate too much, however, Manannan's wife informed him that this good news itself was a lie, and the cup reassembled.'
'A typically Irish tale,' rebuked Carl.
'Quite right!' agreed Robert. 'But if Cormac's wife in Mag Mel was indeed married to Cormac, but to the Cormac who lived in Mag Mel and not to the one who lived in our own world, then that is quite a good way of explaining it, isn't it?'
'What about the Arthurian legends?' asked Charlotte, changing the subject. 'Geoffrey of Monmouth in twelfth century Medieval Wales wrote of Arthur as a heroic warrior who marched into Gaul after the Romans had left Britain, successfully conquered all the tribes of northern Europe and was preparing to march upon Rome itself to set himself at the head of the Roman Empire, when rebellion at home forced him to return. Then there is Arthur the British tribal leader who may have defeated the Saxons in the fifth century AD and little else, and then again the King Arthur of Camelot, the late Medieval Arthur, chivalry, the defense of damsels in distress and the search for the Holy Grail. And the Victorian King Arthur, Tennyson's King Arthur, and his final journey to the Isle of Avalon.'
'There - are - lots of different 'Arthurs',' agreed another of Ariadne's friends. 'But I don't know if there - were - lots of different ones!'
Kelvin came across, squeezed an unoccupied stool out from under the table and sat down between Robert and Jim, who shuffled their bar stools a little to make room for him.
'Were there lots of Geoffries of Monmouth, then?' asked Charlotte, lifting her hair up with both hands. 'All writing different Histories of Britain?'
'Then where are all these other Histories now?' asked Ariadne.
'Every new edition of a work is at least slightly different from the last,' said Jim. 'Layamon's Brut is a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History, but it is not exactly the same.'
'But if everyone's life evolves,' asked Kelvin, 'not like a tightrope walker on a rope but like a hiker in a landscape, as you suggest, why can we reconstruct the past as consistently as we do. Because history books agree in all essential points, don't they?'
'That is just the point,' exclaimed Jim. 'There is no evidence for King Arthur at all!'
Here is an idea then,' Kelvin continued, warming to a train of thought that appealed to his mathematical mind. 'Suppose it is possible to build surfaces around the event horizon of a black hole, one containing a huge mass, like that of an entire galaxy! Surfaces like the layers of an onion. If these surfaces were all inhabited by some indestructible creature and were all interconnected, it would be possible to set up no end of experiments to test your theory. If I was one of these creatures I could do something memorable on a layer far from the event horizon, scuttle down near to it then return in a few days time to the upper level again and see whether the ancient history books describing things which happened three thousand years ago still agreed with my own memory of what took place a couple of days before!'
'But their records are incomplete. I know this civilisation!' exclaimed Charlotte, warming to the fantasy. 'They didn't write everything down! And anyway, how come this person can suddenly live for three thousand years?'
'Because time goes by more slowly the nearer one gets to the event horizon of a black hole,' explained Kelvin. 'So if a creature descended to a level that was very close to it, time would slow down quite a lot and up above everything would be scurrying around as though in a video run on extra-fast forward.'
'There is nothing new in that idea,' said Robert. 'In the ancient Irish story of Osian the son of Finn mac Cumhal, Osian and his father are beside the sea one day when a beautiful princess comes riding across the waves. Come with me to the Land of Youth - she says to Osian, and they both ride off to this wonderful land across the ocean. But after a few weeks Osian wants to return and when he comes to the place where only a short while before he had been standing with his father and goes to Finn's house, he finds nothing but a grassy mound where the house had stood. In despair, he accosts a group of men who take offense at his language. What is your name - they demand. My name is Osian, son of Finn mac Cumhal - he replies. Then you are a truly remarkable young man - they tell him - because you father has been dead for three hundred years!'
The girl behind the table had been watching Jim the whole time this conversation had been going on. But when Jim pushed his way back from the toilets, comfortable now and looking forward to going over to speak to her, she had gone. The rest of the evening faded into a haze of rather disappointed and vacant merriment.
·
Jim and Carl walked into the teaching laboratory, greeted a group of first-year undergraduate students who were chatting together around the end of a long row of tables, and then went to stand by the window. Robert spotted them and came over. The laboratory faced north, fortunately, and with the windows open a small breeze tried its best to dissipate the heat of a June afternoon. A moment later, Ron came in, placed some sheets of paper on an overhead projector that lay in front of the whiteboards, rolled up his sleeves, thrust his face towards the hushed rows of students and began to give his preparatory guide to the final exercise of the course, in a very loud voice, casting an unsettling stare in Jim's direction as he delivered this detailed oratory. Jim quietly walked over to where Kelvin was watching some workmen laying a bright yellow cable in the street below. The noise of their work, and the sound of the traffic, drifted into the lab, but nobody minded, given that shutting the windows was an option not to be considered. Everybody was good-humoured; the undergrads because it was the last week of term, the male postgrads because demonstrating allowed for a little social interaction, particularly with the female undergraduates, and they were paid for it as well.
'You didn't make it to the Isle of Wight, again, then' said Kelvin.
'Too busy,' replied Jim. 'And Ariadne was in the middle of sitting her finals last week. She wanted to go but I thought it best not to. We're going next weekend.'
Jim walked with Kelvin down to the Stables for a cup of tea afterwards, when the 'practical' had come to an end, and as he was passing the telephone that served as the main communication link between the Stables and the Pierce Building, it began to ring. Jim answered it hesitantly, thinking that it might be Ron looking for him.
'Hello.'
'Oh, hello Jim.' It was the voice of Paula, the Department secretary. 'I have had a telephone call from someone in the Department of Biology,' she explained, 'asking for help with a vacuum chamber or something. If anybody down there feels like helping a damsel in distress...' she paused to let this have the effect she hoped, 'they should contact...' she paused again, 'Hermione, on extension 5497.'