The Department of Biology was five minutes walk away and Jim soon found himself staring into a row of glass cases lining the walls of a foyer, looking at the skeletons of snakes and lizards. With each breath he seemed to be inhaling an atmosphere that was faintly laced with an alien smell that was becoming mildly nauseous. He became aware of a movement out of the corner of his eye, turned from a wire-mounted display of an iguana's skeleton and there standing before him was the girl he had seen in the Amble Inn a few days before. She was as attractive as he remembered.
'It is very kind of you to help me,' she said, innocently. 'I feel so stupid. But if I loose them all now I might jeopardise my entire second year's work. I spent six weeks collecting the seeds in Brazil over Easter. Perhaps I shouldn't have sown them all at once. But my supervisor said nothing to dissuade me.'
'A PhD is rather like being thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool and seeing if you can swim,' Jim sympathised.
'But the old vacuum chamber in here seemed ideal,' Hermione continued, as she opened the door into a lab. 'I can regulate the temperature perfectly, but now I have locked them all in!' She took a deep breath and let out a sigh. 'I didn't know it had a lock, even. I thought it would have been pulled out along with all the other stuff. I haven't a clue where to find a key! The technicians here know nothing about it. They say it came over from Chemistry with a lot of other junk, but no one in Chemistry seems to know anything about it either.'
'Is there enough light in there?' Jim asked, peering through an opening in the side, about three inches in diameter, where pipe work had obviously been wrenched out when the chamber was decommissioned.
'Yes, that flex leads to a light, I put it in myself,' said Hermione, proudly.
'Is there enough air in there to keep them alive?' he asked.
'Yes, but I have no way of watering them,' she said. That is the problem. The plastic canopies over the trays, although there are plenty of openings down the sides, but it makes it impossible for me to reach them with a spray, however I direct the nozzle.'
·
The computer model came to a halt. Jim transferred the output into a graphics file, changed the parameters on the modelling package and set the program running again. 'The old lady could not cry for many days afterwards,' he wrote in another window as his program crunched its numbers, 'but finally found release very suddenly in the company of a friend. The intruders had not taken anything of any value, but something that was priceless to her. The only link that remained with her daughter. A box of photographs. She had no grave. The ship that had carried her daughter lay somewhere, lost, and now she had only her memory. Her memory. And soon that would be gone.'
Activity in the process statistics box jumped suddenly and the window containing his process commands began pouring out a torrent of information, angrily, defiantly, in a core dump. The program had crashed. Jim made a quick alteration to some code, recompiled it and set it running again. Then he opened another text file.
'From the depths of the lake, the excavator pulled a scoopful of thick black mud which sucked and swung and slopped and coalesced with a paler ooze, as the driver brought it around and deposited it heavily onto the mountainous pile behind the vehicle.
'The engine noise dropped a little and he shouted, 'I hit something then!' and the noise increased as the arm swung into the trench again and moved cautiously, this time pushing and probing.
'The engine noise stopped. 'Do you want to get someone down there?' the driver shouted.
'The tank had been abandoned in the first hour of the battle and had lain there, submerged in the mud ever since. The excavator worked and the sole survivor of the tank's crew surveyed the black iron shell as it emerged, and went down to place two poppies and a cross on the heavily corroded metalwork. Two of his old friends still lay inside. When he had laid the poppies, he asked for some clean water to be brought over. Washing the mud from the tank, just below the turret where the corrosion had not eaten too deeply, he revealed, after a little searching, the word 'Hermione' scratched deeply into the steel. 'I did that with the tip of a bayonet,' said the old man with a frown, his voice shaking.
He was frowning because all these years he had remembered the name he had inscribed in the metal to have been 'Ariadne'.
'Somewhere in the forest was an open space where a low hill contained three circular mounds. As the knight approached, a mist came up and encircled him, and as he walked towards the mounds, he found himself approaching a great castle, its towers rising high before him. The drawbridge fell and across the water came a beautiful maiden. Her name was Hermione. She stopped and beckoned him to approach and with a racing heart, he did so. But as he drew near, the mist became thicker, the castle and the maiden melted away and he found himself climbing the side of a grassy mound. When the mist cleared, it revealed the bare forest surrounding him again.'
Jim clicked back into the process window, reset the parameters and set it crunching his numbers once again.
·
The telephone rang in the lab. Carl was just leaving, so Jim got up and answered it. 'Meet you for lunch in a little while,' said Ariadne. 'If you bring Kelvin along at about ten to one, Charlotte will be there.' She said this with a twinkle in her voice.
'I don't know whether I can do that,' replied Jim. Persuading Kelvin to delay lunch would probably be difficult. The postgrads, who were not tied to a lecture timetable, preferred to eat at the earlier and quieter time of twelve o'clock, though being the last week of term, routines were already changing.
'Oh, I will come over and work on him,' said Ariadne, laughing again. She had received the results of her degree earlier that morning and was still very exited and happy. 'I have booked my car on the ferry for Saturday morning,' she said. 'So we should be on the island before lunch!'
Jim had a filter coffee machine in the office he shared with Carl and Robert, but often took his mug down to the Stables where there was a microwave oven, a kettle, coffee, some electric rings and an old television set, for those late evenings at the light table. It was an alternative social focus for the postgrads, for when the Seminar Room in the main building became too full of card-playing technicians and ebullient staff. The lab contained in addition, three or four fading and molting easy chairs, a couple of upright and angle-adjustable draughting boards and a large light table, that looked like a wardrobe that had been overturned, the back replaced by a thick sheet of glass and a strong fluorescent light placed inside. Kelvin was at the light table, working on the diagrams for his forthcoming talk at a conference in Rome. The light from the table shone through a scatter of drawing pens, Letraset, glue-sticks and scissors, and did battle with the sunlight streaming in through the window.
'Don't disturb me,' warned Kelvin. 'I have only until this afternoon to get this lot ready for the photographer. Then he can get the slides done for me by Friday afternoon.'
'When are you off?' Jim asked, as Ariadne came in through the door.
'Next Tuesday,' replied Kelvin. 'And I need time to do some more computer modeling before I go.' Ariadne went over to the light table.
'What is this!' she asked.
Kelvin explained his piece of artwork. 'It is a black hole of immense size; ten to the power of ten solar masses, one with ten naughts after it - ten thousand million times the mass of the sun. If all the stars and planets at the centre in the galaxy were to collapse into a super-massive black hole, they would form a singularity with an event horizon of around ten to the power of ten kilometres radius, well over five thousand million miles, comparable to the radius of the orbit of Neptune around the sun. And near this vast surface, people would appear to squash down like a wafer by the curvature of space, and time would pass differently for them. The universe at large would appear to run faster and faster to them, the closer they got to it. It's a jokey conclusion to the end of my talk. These incredibly advanced beings have built a structure around this event horizon where they can sit and watch the end of the universe unfold. To these technically advanced creatures the end of the universe might not seem as remote as it does to most people, including research funding bodies at the moment. I got this idea from our conversation the other night.'
·
That evening, Jim went down to the Stables and found a game of Portakabin Golf in progress. Despite the name, the temporary buildings were not Portakabins, and were, in fact, quite extensive. A circuit of corridors wound around the complex with a back fairway of about thirty yards. Enough for a lofted shot! Putting with the broken iron club, however, required quite a lot of skill, as did judging the slope of the linoleum floor through the Stables. The floor beneath items of furniture made for good bunkers.
Jim had found a solution to Hermione's problem that afternoon with the help of a mirror on a stick. Hermione's own Department had been able to provide some dry ice, with the agreement of her supervisor; and with the aid of the mirror thrust like a dentist's tool into the cavity of the vacuum chamber, Jim had been able to introduce some of this carbon dioxide snow through the hole by an exact amount. Soon, the top of a cool mist hung like the surface of a pond just beneath the shelf that Hermione had laid her seed trays on. The first attempt at introducing steam into the hole had scalded Jim's hand, which was still painful, but a short piece of rubber hose on the spout of the laboratory kettle had solved the problem, and it had worked like a charm. The water condensed in the cool air above the carbon dioxide pond and against the trays and even against the seedlings themselves and by the end of the day they both knew that her plants were out of danger. There was still nobody with any idea how to break the door open, though, or how to find the key. But at least in such a carbon dioxide-rich environment, they ought to thrive, even if Hermione couldn't actually get at them to do any work!
Kelvin was putting a brave face on his troubles as well, but it was obvious to anyone who knew him that he was unusually dejected.
'But if it was working, why have they fiddled with it?' asked Charlotte. Kelvin gave her a look of exasperated agreement, swivelled in his chair and put his hand briefly up to her waist.
'It is like a new car,' he said. 'They want the latest model. We have had this operating system for eighteen months, running my software perfectly, and now a different one has come along. So they have shoved it on. Suppose you had a car and the manufacturers sent you the latest engine. Wouldn't it be ridiculous! But you stick it in anyway, and because it is a little different in shape from the old one, the bodywork has to be bashed about a bit to make it fit and then you discover that the power output is wrong for the gearbox so that has to be changed as well, then you discover that the rear axle cannot cope with all this new power and that the axle you need is the wrong size, so the whole of the back has to be bashed around to make it fit...' Kelvin lashed out at the plastic side of the computer terminal, making the screen dance and wobble.
'Jason at the Computer Centre upgraded the operating system earlier this week while I was doing these diagrams and nothing of mine works any more. And we have cancelled our maintenance contract for this software. He reckons I am going to be off the road for three months at least!'
'How are you going to finish your work for Rome?' asked Ariadne.
'How am I going to finish the work for my thesis?' he asked, despairingly.
·
'Let me explain,' said Carl. 'It is not the absolute temperature that makes the difference, but the time over which the heat occurs. The centre of your ash layer will have held its heat for much longer than the surface. And you told me yourself that you took samples from the middle of a thick deposit to avoid contamination.'
'Yes,' Jim agreed. 'But I don't necessarily believe this new theory.' Here he was, expressing uncertainty, a lack of conviction, a growing desire, indeed, to concede everything.
'It explains my results as well,' Carl continued, enthusiastically. 'The blackened timbers I took samples from were buried by tens of metres of volcanic ash, at an initial temperature of a thousand degrees centigrade. They must have been cooking beneath all this heat for years. Probably for tens of years. I think it is quite a neat idea.'
'Except that there is nothing in the theory that requires correction for temperature, let alone its duration,' objected Jim.
'Perhaps there ought to be!' said Carl.
'Well, I can easily prove of disprove this idea, by collecting fresh samples of ash from the top of one of the burnt layers of the Roman villa.'
'Do you think Ron will pay for you to go out again?'
·
Jim did not know. The words at the bottom of the screen asked him whether he wanted to save the text he had just written, and he did not know. An hour and a half's work, hanging, poised between birth and oblivion. It was Thursday afternoon and he was getting tired. The old PC he was using in a quiet corner of the library was still running a command line operating system. He hadn't intended to sit here even.
On an impulse he hit 'no' and watched the text vanish, without a murmur from the floppy-disc drive. Sickening silence. He didn't care.
The way ahead was far from clear to him. Gone were the days when excitement had fuelled his work, the feeling that he was tracking a large beast that would soon come into view and show itself clearly. The beast had vanished beyond the horizon and lay there taunting him, or perhaps it had disappeared completely. Perhaps it had been a mirage all along. Perhaps it was much larger even than Jim imagined and had disguised itself as the very horizon, and lay in wait for somebody else; someone with a greater power of thought than he could muster. He could not prove that it was there. And even to himself; he was not sure any more. Perhaps it was all a nonsense; perpetrated in good faith and through the highest regard for the truth, but a nonsense nonetheless.
Jim opened a new file and began to write furiously, from the top of his head, everything he had tried to do. Perhaps this would serve as a draft introduction. But as he wrote, he knew that he could not submit the lines he was writing. The words began to falter. Jim knew that he would have to explain and justify almost every sentence by a chapter of examples. He arrowed the curser down to a rudimentary command menu and 'quit', sending it into oblivion.
He had nothing to save.