The Adjacent Part 13

Colleagues and friends have sometimes asked me how I feel about that, their implication being, I suppose, that it was my line of questioning or my aggressive or confrontational stance that tipped the great man over. He was widely perceived to be undergoing a period of deep disillusionment, self-absorption and depression, answering no letters or emails, never agreeing to meet journalists or fellow researchers, and had famously buried himself in a small village somewhere in the English countryside, living under an a.s.sumed name. There were reported to be MI5 operatives monitoring his activities, and keeping all strangers away.

Almost none of this was in fact the case. It was true that he was living alone in a quiet village, but it was an open secret to the people who lived there who he was. The place was, incidentally, not at all an obscure hamlet concealed from the world, but a fairly large village in a popular area, much favoured by City workers who commuted to their jobs in London. There was a mainline station there, with trains every half-hour into Charing Cross Station. Rietveld's house was on the main street of the village, although not close to where the shops were. There were no secret agents anywhere near him and probably never had been. As for him not speaking to journalists: I contacted him from the office of my newspaper in London, made no secret of who I worked for and requested an interview and photographs. He agreed at once, and I travelled down to meet him early the following week.

I went by train because I wanted to see for myself what the village was like from his point of view he did not drive and was known to dislike cars. I planned to walk around the village before approaching his house: to see where the nearest shops were, how far it was to walk to the station, and so on. The photographer was planning to drive down and would meet me at the house later, towards the end of my interview.

I had interviewed a n.o.bel laureate before the writer, philosopher and pacifist Bai Kuang Han, who was awarded the Peace Price in 2023 but Thijs Rietveld was a much more formidable challenge for a non-specialist journalist. Until about twenty years earlier he had been working at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, engaged in theoretical physics. It was for this work in sub-particulate dynamics that he was belatedly awarded the n.o.bel Prize for Physics, but the making of the award coincided with the first results of his more recent work. This had the unfortunate effect, for Rietveld, of drawing attention to it. Working with a team of quantum field theorists Rietveld's a.n.a.lytical research work into the so-called Perturbative Adjacent Field had been until then shrouded in secrecy and high-level security.

At the time the n.o.bel was announced, few people had heard of him he emerged from the obscurity of the closed unit where the PAF was being developed, flew to Oslo, made a short, gracious speech of acceptance in Dutch, then returned to Strasbourg, the location of the laboratory. It was only then that the public became aware of the PAF in the most general of terms the popular press, guessing and simplifying, immediately described it as an infallible weapon of pa.s.sive defence. It was soon known as The Weapon That Will End War. Within a year, though, the wider scientific community had been informed of the result of the PAF research, and not long afterwards it was universally understood in those circles. Rietveld modestly shared the credit for the development with the other scientists, but because he was a n.o.bel laureate he was a.s.sumed to be the team leader. It was in fact his theoretical work that led to the development of a practical application.

The PAF was for a while known as the adjacency defence. As originally conceived it had no aggressive function, being in every respect a pa.s.sive reactant. Using what quantum physicists sometimes call annihilation operators, an adjacency field could be created to divert physical matter into a different, or adjacent, realm. An incoming missile, to use the famous example described by Professor Rietveld, need not be intercepted or diverted or destroyed it could be moved to an adjacent quantum dimension, so that to all intents and purposes it would cease to exist. In its early working models, adjacency consumed a huge amount of energy, but it was in its nature that it could be minimized, maximized, deployed again and again. Subsequent development of the technique concentrated on reducing the energy load, of making the defence system a more practical device. Professor Rietveld once optimistically described the potential for an ideative future world in which every city, every scientific installation, every home, perhaps even every individual person, might one day be permanently protected from physical a.s.sault by a localized field of adjacency.

Drawing on the lessons of history, in particular the experiences of their forebears who had worked on the Manhattan Project, the theoretical work which led directly to the first nuclear weapons, Rietveld and his colleagues produced an extensive and formal rationale in defence of their theoretical work. The Perturbative Adjacent Field had no possible application as an aggressive weapon, they explained in their apologia. Its function was wholly peaceful. It could not destabilize the world, or in any way affect the balance of power between east and west, south and north. Ideologies, economic systems, religious beliefs, political movements, would remain intact because they were immune from its effect. Adjacency could not kill, could not poison, would not pollute, did not spill radioactive waste, could not become corrupted by falling into the wrong hands.

It was what followed that sent Professor Rietveld into his self-imposed exile from the world. Within two years the first test of an adjacency weapon took place in the Gobi Desert naturally, it was 'under the strictest of scientific and moral controls'. The use of the word annihilation was picked up by a journalist from a scientific paper, and thence into popular understanding. Proliferation followed, as was inevitable, as Rietveld and the others had feared and tried to prevent, and soon every major or expansionist power had one form or another of the device. No one threatened to use it it was simply enough to possess the capability. There was no talk any more of its role as a pa.s.sively reactant defence.

I had heard that Professor Rietveld was not well, that he had been diagnosed with some unspecified but degenerative condition, and that he was now eighty-two. I tried a long shot, made contact, asked for my interview, and that was how it began.

2.

In the event I never wrote or published the interview based on our meeting. I had proposed it for my own reasons: I was working on the Society page for the newspaper, and felt I was in a journalistic dead end. My editor agreed that I could try writing serious profiles of famous or celebrated personalities in the arts or sciences.

Professor Rietveld was my first project: I heard a mention of his work on adjacency defence on a late-night television programme, and I made contact with him the next day after a lead from a friendly official at the Foreign Office. I knew little about Rietveld, I had no background in physics, certainly had no grasp at all of quantum field theory, and was as ill-prepared for a serious interview as ever I had been. I spent the weekend browsing through the newspaper's database, but without learning much about him in any depth, or anything closely relevant to his work.

His early life was in the Netherlands, then latterly in Germany, the USA and the UK all this was adequately covered but it had little directly to do with the discoveries of his later career. There was extensive reporting of his n.o.bel prize and his speech, and the Science & Technology page of the newspaper ran a long and detailed essay by an outside contributor, an academic at Cambridge University. This was an account of the theoretical basis of parity-symmetry, weak interactions and particles with significant ma.s.ses. After his outburst against the President of the USA at a White House dinner in his honour, and his subsequent disappearance from public life, Professor Rietveld became a different kind of celebrity: an exile from a body of thought, a political protester, a scientist who was trying to repudiate his own discoveries, someone who shunned not only publicity but contact with other researchers in his field. As often happens with people in public life, after intense initial media curiosity, interest about his possible whereabouts or activities was almost non-existent.

I don't know what I expected to find on arrival: maybe a physically handicapped old man struggling against cancer. Or an embittered reject from the body scientific. Or perhaps even a senile, shrunken figure, lost in disconcerting mental fragments of despair, anger and misremembered details.

In person he looked many years younger than his actual age. He walked with a slight limp, blaming osteoarthritis. He spoke excellent, almost unaccented English, but many of the books on his shelves were in Dutch or German. He spoke in a wry, serious voice, and made no jokes or self-effacing remarks. He told me he had a housekeeper, whom I did not meet as it was her day off. A nurse visited him once a week and collected his prescription medication for him. He showed me his garden, which he said he felt obliged to keep tidy, and he showed me round his house, which he said he loved and felt no such obligation to tidiness it was in fact not at all a cluttered or unclean house, but had the cosy feel of a place well lived in. He said he knew none of his neighbours by name, but always greeted them in a friendly way. He told me his wife was dead and that they had had one daughter, but she too had died a few years before.

He was neither sad, bitter, secretive nor particularly outgoing. He answered my questions with apparent truth and sincerity, but because the questions I was asking were general in nature, so too were his replies.

Eventually he asked me if I understood quantum theory, or quantified field theory. I told him I did not and he looked relieved. He said he was tired of trying to explain it to non-physicists. Then he asked me why I had approached him for the interview. By this time I felt there was nothing to lose by honesty, so I told him I was looking for a better position on the newspaper I worked for. He told me that if in fact I had turned up at his house armed with detailed questions about bosons, gravitons or superstrings, he would not have had much to say because he was now many years behind and would not have wanted to risk being quoted in the scientific press, revealing how out of date he had become on quantum theory.

We were interrupted by the arrival of the photographer, who had driven down from London. He was exactly on time, which surprised me, as photographers normally turned up either late or early at interviews like this. He was someone I had not worked with before, a young man who spoke with an American accent, apparently on his first freelance commission for the newspaper. He proved to be a careful and imaginative worker. With the professor's permission he went through the various rooms in the house on his own, then walked slowly around the garden, seeking angles or positions from which to take his pictures.

When he was ready he led Professor Rietveld into his garden. The professor paused only to pick up a pink-and-amber coloured conch sh.e.l.l I had noticed earlier, sitting on a shelf near the window. He nodded to me with a faint smile as he followed the photographer into the garden, but gave no hint about what was amusing him. I was left alone in the large kitchen-diner. This was where the professor told me he took all his meals: the sink was piled up with unwashed dishes, but otherwise it was a clean, comfortable room with a view down the garden.

I watched the young man working with his subject, asking him to stand in the shade beneath a large tree, to walk past the beds of roses, to sit in the rustic seat on the side of the slightly overgrown lawn. It was high summer: flowers were everywhere, and honey bees were hovering around the dog roses and buddleia that were growing beside the small patio.

The professor looked relaxed and cooperative, and as I watched him chatting to the photographer I began to think that I might after all be able to write an intriguing or interesting portrait of the man, even if I understood little about his work. It was a human story, perhaps: one of the world's great scientists, living out his years in the green Suss.e.x countryside, feeling behind the times he had help explicate, beyond all ambition or regret or pride.

The two men were speaking intently to each other, but from where I was standing at the window I could not hear a word. The professor pointed up towards the sky the American guy looked where he was indicating. Then the professor walked to the side of the garden, where he had laid the conch sh.e.l.l on the edge of the lawn. He moved to the centre of the gra.s.s, holding the large sh.e.l.l in one hand. He posed like that: both hands extended, the left empty, the right balancing the beautiful sh.e.l.l with its subtle colours and the fascinating spiral construction.

The photographer took many shots of him: from different angles, close up, and from as far across the garden as he could back away to. He finished with a series of shots from middle range, presumably capturing full-length images.

Finally, the young American appeared to be satisfied he had enough shots. Both men shook hands amiably. They walked back towards the house, the professor carrying his sh.e.l.l in one hand. The photographer halted and raised his camera to take a picture of something above his head. The professor immediately restrained him, swiftly pulling down the other man's arms to prevent any pictures being taken.

They entered the kitchen together, apparently still cordial, and the professor put the conch sh.e.l.l back on the shelf.

I said to the photographer, 'Do you have everything you need?'

'Yes.' He fished into an inner pocket then handed me his card. I glanced at it, because I liked the way he worked and I wanted to remember his name if future work opportunities arose. He was called Tibor Tarent, a freelance with membership of a couple of professional organizations, an address and contact details in London. 'I'll see you at the newspaper office tomorrow,' he said. 'I'll bring some prints in, and we can have a look at them.'

All this was the sort of practical conversation I usually had with photographers sent to work with me on an a.s.signment. The next day's meeting would probably include the pictures editor as well as my boss.

But then Tibor Tarent said, 'Would you help me get my stuff back in the car?' He led me outside his car was parked opposite the house. As soon as we were away from the house he said, 'That is one of the most amazing men I have ever met. I'll never forget what happened. Did you see what he was doing while I was taking pictures of him?'

'I was in the kitchen I couldn't see too well.'

'It's impossible to describe. I'll show you the photos tomorrow. He was like a magician he could make that big sh.e.l.l appear and disappear. I couldn't see how he was doing it.'

'I was watching from the window, but there was a trellis in the way. He didn't seem to be moving about.'

'That was it. He didn't move a muscle, but something weird was happening. I took pictures of it all. You'll see tomorrow.'

While we were speaking he had opened the car and placed his camera equipment carefully inside. Then we shook hands, he climbed into the car and drove away.

I returned to the house.

The professor was sitting at his scrubbed pine table in the kitchen-diner, resting his head on his hands. He looked up, and his eyes looked redder than they had been before, his complexion more sallow.

He said, 'I'm afraid that young man has tired me out. That's not a criticism of him he has a job to do, but sometimes it is a real effort to keep up an appearance of normality.'

'Professor Rietveld, just before the photographer arrived you were talking about physics.'

'Was I really? I didn't think you would be interested.'

'I said I didn't understand quantum physics, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in what your work meant to you.'

'My work was my life.'

'That's what I thought.'

'And in some ways my life ended after I was given that prize, because after that it was impossible to keep Perturbative Adjacency secret. Of course the media was interested in what I was doing, but so too were my colleagues and rivals. We were forced to declare our hand long before we were ready. What we had discovered was more shocking, more devastating in theory than splitting the atom. What we wanted to do before we announced our findings was either to find some way of controlling it, putting it to pa.s.sive use only, or, much more difficult, we wanted to try and close the Pandora's box.'

'I always thought adjacency could only be used pa.s.sively.'

'That is what we said then. Of course, we should have known, and we did know, that once our papers were open to review it was only a matter of time before some other group discovered the whole truth.'

'I understood that the balance of power had not destabilized.'

'The major powers, yes. How we trust them! Look, I must show you what I tried to show that young man with the camera. Please, come into the garden with me.'

I helped him out of his chair. He picked up a small sc.r.a.p of card that was lying next to some books on a shelf, then gave me his arm so I could support him. We walked together into the sun-drenched garden.

'You obviously now realize what happened to me a few years ago when I was in Strasbourg. We were naive, all of us but especially me we thought we were making a breakthrough into something that would neutralize weapons. It would always be safe to use, non-aggressive in nature, harmless because it would remove harm. But what we all feared soon came to pa.s.s: minds other than ours worked out how to make quantum adjacency into a weapon of war. It's now too late to regret that. We can't change history. What we most dreaded, though, was that sooner or later the process would become devolved, if you see what I mean. Small groups, terrorists, insurgents, private militias, might be able to get hold of smaller, more portable forms of adjacency generator. With people like that, even the false responsibility of the major powers would be gone.'

'I understand,' I said.

'I want you to look at what I have had built above this garden.'

He pointed upwards. I saw now that a small metal contrivance, not in any way streamlined or given the sheen of professional manufacture, hung directly above the lawn. It was held up by three strong wires, which ran from narrow metal poles, two placed in the far corners of the garden, and the third close to the house. The object suspended at the centre had various metal and plastic components, but the centrepiece was a dull grey sphere, rather like the side of an old aluminium kettle. It was about half a metre in diameter.

'Now let me ask you if you know what a tetrahedron is?'

I said, 'It's a geometric form of some kind, isn't it?'

He brandished the piece of card he had picked up. It was in the shape of a parallelogram, and had three creases scored though it. It had obviously been folded and unfolded many times.

'This is called a net,' he said, meaning the card. He quickly folded it to form a solid triangle. 'You see, a tetrahedron is a triangular shape with four sides and four vertices. It is physically very stable, very strong it always takes the same form, no matter which side is down. This is similar to what some physicists call an interaction, in this case a strong interaction. We can only break it down by a process of theoretical annihilation, using what we call a bosonic field annihilation operator. Am I explaining too much?'

I was scribbling as much as I could into my notebook, from which I am now transcribing what the professor told me that summer's day, but in fact he was, as he said, explaining too much and too quickly.

'This card model is just a symbol, a way to explain,' he said. He unfolded it and slipped it into his pocket. 'The quantum adjacency we created can be considered as a tetrahedron of particles.' He pointed up to the globe above our heads. 'Think of that as the apex, the strong constant point. Beneath it is a virtual tetrahedron, so where we are standing is in the centre of a triangle imprinted on the ground.'

I could not help glancing down. Beneath me was a lawn in need of mowing.

Professor Rietveld said, 'I need you to understand what I say, because I want you to write about it in your article. What you see here is not a weapon. This is an experimental piece, one I adjust and calibrate for scientific purposes. But a portable adjacency weapon, much cruder than anything ever worked on in laboratory conditions, operates from above, just as this experimental model does. It has to be directly above whatever the target is. In practice, in anger, it may be dropped from a plane, fired from a mortar or a large gun, fired in a missile. It may even be thrown from a high building. In fact, one already has been used in that way: the disaster in G.o.dhra two years ago you will remember that?'

I did: a mysterious explosion had destroyed a part of that Indian city. The attack had eventually been blamed on Islamic separatists, but there was no certainty about that and many of the details about what really happened were still obscure.

'When adjacency is used as a weapon it creates a tetrahedron of quantum annihilation: a three-sided pyramid of equilateral triangles, with a fourth triangle as its base. Anything beneath it, anything within that triangle, is vulnerable.' He was speaking breathlessly, and he was resting his hand on my arm for support. 'That is all, Mrs Flockhart. The technology has fallen into the wrong hands, and if it is ever used it will become a most terrible threat to peace. I am largely responsible for it.'

3.

That night, when I was at home with my family, the children in bed, my husband working in his study on the top floor of the house, the news of Thijs Rietveld's death was announced on television news. At first there was no information about the cause of his death, and in the shock of my sudden grief I a.s.sumed that the life of the man with whom I had spent much of the day had simply come to a natural end. He had certainly looked tired at the end of my interview. The old man I said farewell to as I left his house barely resembled the sprightly and energetic octogenarian who had greeted me on arrival.

When I went into the newspaper office the next morning the truth was coming in from the police in East Suss.e.x. Professor Rietveld had injected himself with a huge overdose of a prescribed painkiller, then drunk at least one gla.s.s of scotch whisky. His body had been found in his garden, lying in the centre of the lawn.

The house and garden were cordoned off, apparently by the police, although confidential sources in the newspaper office suggested that security forces had actually ordered the closure of his house.

In the afternoon, Tibor Tarent, the young American photographer, came into the office as planned. He had of course heard the news. He brought with him several large prints of the photographs he had taken the day before.

All my plans to write a profile of the professor were put on hold, permanently as it turned out. The paper ran a long obituary written by one of his former colleagues, published several private tributes from friends and other colleagues, and within a few days the death of one of the greatest physicists of our era had pa.s.sed into history.

But on that awful day of grief, Tibor Tarent gave me a large photographic print, based on shots he had taken during the last afternoon of Thijs Rietveld's life. It consisted of four separate frames, placed in a rectangle together.

He said, 'You were there, Jane. You saw me taking these photographs. You could see what he and I were doing from where you were standing, couldn't you?'

'I could.'

'And you saw him take that conch, hold it out in his right hand, and stand calmly there on the lawn while I took these shots?'

'That's right.'

We were both staring at the print as it lay on my desk.

'He never put down the conch? You agree?'

'Yes.'

'Did you see him pa.s.s it from hand to hand?'

'No.'

'I took these frames one after the other, just a few seconds apart. What the h.e.l.l happened?'

I said I didn't know. We talked about it for a while, but afterwards Tarent and I went downstairs to a local bar and split a bottle of red wine between us. We drank to the memory of the intriguing old man we had met so briefly. We did not stay long Tibor had another a.s.signment to go to, and I had work to do back in the office.

I still have the print of the photographs he took that day, of Professor Rietveld standing in the centre of his lawn, holding the beautiful conch. I have the print framed behind gla.s.s, and it hangs on the wall above my desk. I am dimly visible in all four of the separate photographs: slightly out of focus beyond the clump of bee-heavy buddleia, but clearly standing inside the house, watching from the window that overlooked the lawn.

The four shots form a rectangle. In the frame at the top left, he is holding the pink-and-amber sh.e.l.l in his right hand. In the picture next to it, he is standing in an almost identical pose, but now the conch has moved to his left hand. Below the first frame, Professor Rietveld is shown holding two identical conch sh.e.l.ls, one in each outstretched hand. In the fourth picture, both his hands are empty.

Only in the fourth picture is the old man smiling at the camera.

PART 5.

Tealby Moor

1.

THE INSTRUMENT BASHER.

For Mike Torrance, Aircraftman First Cla.s.s, known to the others in his crew as 'Floody' Torrance, the sight of a Lancaster flying low in daylight was always a moment of beauty. He and the other members of the ground crew had little time for looking around, but whenever a Lanc landed they almost always raised their heads from what they were doing. The engines would be heard before the plane itself came into sight, which would then pa.s.s low in the near distance across the Lincolnshire farmland. When it turned in for its approach to the airfield, the dark green and brown upper camouflage was briefly visible as it banked. As it headed down towards the runway, nose raised slightly for the landing, the aircraft appeared all black, painted to blend with the night sky in which it flew. At night over Germany it would become invisible, or at least difficult to see, from below.

The beauty of the machine lay in its rough, purposeful and utilitarian shape. Every part of a heavy bomber was there to function as it should, without streamlining or any other flourishes of style. The gun turrets, in the nose and between the tail fins and in the upper part of the main fuselage, were made of bulbous perspex, there were observation bubbles at the sides of the c.o.c.kpit and long bombing doors in the base, the engines were huge Merlins, their cowlings painted as black as the rest of the aircraft, the wings, with a span of more than a hundred feet were thick and round-tipped, holding tanks that would carry enough fuel for up to twelve hours at cruising speed.

Inside there were no comforts for the aircrew, nor for Mike Torrance and the others when they went aboard to service the plane. The seats were barely padded, the interior was only intermittently heated, the long fuselage was narrow and jammed with equipment. Jagged edges and unshielded metal corners protruded from several places. The aircrew in their bulky flying suits, worn over layer after layer of woollen clothing, could barely move about inside. Things were much worse if they had to put on their parachutes. The mental image of the desperate scramble for the escape hatch inside a stricken Lanc tumbling towards the ground, perhaps engulfed in flames, was something on which none of the ground crew could dwell.

There was no sound insulation, so the roar of the unsilenced Merlins was constant and deafening. In flight, thin cold air jetted in through a dozen cracks and apertures. The airframe itself was barbed on the outside with sensors, aerials, ports, access hatches. There was nothing about a Lancaster that did not have to be there, and there was no attempt to conceal what did.