White Light Page 7

  She sighed. 'Yes, for all the good that's done. They think she's just fallen off the wagon, and will come back eventually when her money runs out.'

  'But you don't think that's what's happened?'

  'No, I can't see it. She's been doing so well. Kenny, her boyfriend, says that someone frightened her the other day, I don't know what about, debts possibly, so perhaps she's lying low, but still...' I could hear her doubt and worry.

  'Well, I hope she's ok and turns up soon,' I said, 'if I hear anything from her I'll definitely let you know.' She thanked me, sounding defeated, and rang off.

  I flopped onto the sofa with my curry and the cat, and spent the rest of the evening trying to watch some inane comedy on the TV. Perhaps I should just be a good little citizen and pretend that everything was fine, that atrocities didn't happen, that everyone paid their taxes and the boys in blue looked after us all. Perhaps Susie just had a visit from a debt collector and did a runner.

  I leaned my head back against the cushion, feeling crushed. Everything that had happened today was going round and round in my head like one of those sinister merry-go-rounds in horror films, Richard and Maggie and Freddy and Gilbert and the house and Susie and the video and the police all rising and falling and twirling and grinning...

  Some hours later I woke enough to realise that I'd fallen asleep, so dragged myself upstairs, a vague prickling feeling at the base of my skull warning me that something was wrong, something out of place, but I didn't know what.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Tuesday, 7 April 2015. 09:36

  Another day. I had slept really badly, waking early again with hot eyes and an aching head. I dressed, and staggered downstairs to drink instant coffee in the kitchen Sarah had designed and re-designed in her imagination, and felt completely blank.

  I couldn't face the Oxford rush-hour traffic so instead spent a miserable hour answering the letters that had arrived for Sarah recently, and then stared for a while at the unfeasibly large bill that had arrived from the solicitors – God knows how I was going to pay that. And to add to my feelings of failure this morning my head had a huge reddening bruise across it, thanks to my encounter with Freddy Wright. Even Fergus had buggered off, presumably to be fussed over by Max next door.

  My phone was buzzing every five minutes with the same Oxford number, also fuelling my bad mood. I googled it whilst forcing down a bit of toast, and sure enough it was an extension at the Oxford Mail. Well, you can fuck off, I thought, blocking it.

  After all that annoyance I decided that I'd might as well go to work, write up my meagre results from the unbibium sample, email them to Levi and to Gilbert and then just pack up the lab. Maybe I did need some more time off. Or another job. I couldn't really care which.

  The lab was still looking deserted when I pulled through the last of the lunchtime traffic and into the carpark. Norman said a heavy 'Good afternoon,' and handed me a letter that had been tucked into my office pigeonhole. I nodded, and shoved it into my pocket. It was probably some boring departmental bullshit and I'd open it later. I went to step past him, but the porter put his beefy hand on my arm and then pointed behind me to the foyer doors. I turned round, and saw a skeletal man in a hoody staring at me.

  'He's come to see you, Dr Kitchener,' Norman explained as I glanced at him, 'His says his name is – er – Kenny, and he's here about Susie.' I stared, completely at a loss. Finally, the penny dropped in my reluctant brain and I remembered my conversation with Katie from Homes for All the night before.

  'Oh – right. Why has he come to see me?' Norman looked interested, but I just thanked him and went back across to the entrance, stepping out into the uncertain light of a Spring afternoon. Kenny, strangely, didn't approach me, instead he stood a little way off, jiggling coins in the pocket of his cheap jogging bottoms.

  I smiled, making an effort to be pleasant, 'Hi, Kenny? I'm Adam. You came to see me?' I walked over and reached my hand across to shake, but he didn't take it. I let my arm fall, feeling like an idiot. I became suddenly aware that Norman was busy gawping through the glass doors, so walked away round the corner, hoping my visitor would come too. After a skittish second, he did, and we came to a stop again just by the car park.

  'So, what can I do for you?' I tried again, a bit more impatiently. He was staring at me with a strange expression, like he couldn't believe it was me.

  'You're Kitchener, Sarah's husband?' he said at last, with the raspy voice of a heavy smoker.

  'Yeah.' I nodded. Then, 'you can smoke here, if you want.'

  The words were hardly out of my mouth when he'd whipped a packet of tobacco out of his pocket and was expertly rolling a thin cigarette. He had it lit in a second, breathing in deeply, and seeming to relax slightly.

  'Have you seen Susie?' he asked through the smoke. His eyes were narrowed, watching me for – what? A lie?

  'No. I heard she was missing. She hasn't come home, then?'

  'How do you know she's missing?' His eyes were slits of suspicion.

  'Katie phoned me last night,' I said. I was starting to feel annoyed at this panto. Why are you here?'

  Kenny jabbed his fag at me with the words, 'I reckon you were the last person to see her.'

  'What? I've never met the woman. What are you –'

  'Friday afternoon, about three o'clock. You visited her at the flat. She said you'd come round.' He was getting agitated again, his thin limbs twitching. I put my hands up, placating.

  'Last Friday afternoon I was here. I didn't go anywhere. I certainly have never met Susie, and I don't even know where she lives.'

  'Temple Cowley,' he shot back, 'above the shops.'

  'Well, good for you, but I've never been to your place.'

  'She said you had two black eyes.' His gaze roamed over my face, making me think of the policeman from Beechcroft Road. Then he frowned, 'but you only got a bit of a bruise...'

  'Listen, Susie must be – mistaken. I've never met her. Ask her if...'

  'This is her.' He fumbled out a mobile and showed me a photo of a tallish woman with a pony tail. It was a selfie – her and Kenny jammed in closely together, both smiling. I felt a lump of sadness in my throat. I shook my head and handed the phone back.

  'She's missing, I told you, she's gone off and I want to find her.' All of a sudden Kenny's energy drained away, and he slumped. 'I just want to find her. She told me that you'd come to see her and she was frightened, and then the next day I woke up and she was just gone, vanished, and I've been everywhere but I can't find her.'

  His loss made my irritation dissolve. I had been here. I knew this.

  'I'm sorry, Kenny, I really am. But I didn't visit her and I don't know what's happened.' I took a moment to phrase my next question, 'Was she ok? I mean, Katie, from Homes for All, said Susie's been worried about my wife's accident. Did she know anything about what happened?'

  He looked up then, his shrewd grey eyes meeting mine, and sharing sympathy. 'Yeah, she's been going on about it, but she didn't know nothing. She thought that people might have,' he shuffled his feet, 'killed Sarah, but Susie is – it was just one of her ideas, she gets sort of stuck...' He shrugged.

  We stood there for a long moment. The warm air blew round us, ruffling the leaves and dusting a few blossoms down from the ornamental trees around the building.

  'At least Katie is looking for Susie too.'

  Kenny snorted, and threw the fag end onto the ground. 'Huh! Some help she is. Patronising cow!' I couldn't help but smile at that. 'Your wife, though, Sarah, she was all right.'

  I nodded, and he didn't say anything else, just turned on his heel and sloped off out of the car park and down the road. I wondered where Susie was, and whether she'd really known anything. That couldn't be why she'd disappeared, could it? I shook my head at the stupid idea and turned back into the building.

  'Everything alright, Dr Kitchener?' asked Norman.

  'Yeah,' I said, flatly, then turned and said: 'Listen, if you get any calls from someone at
the Oxford Mail, or from a woman called Tessa Davies, can you tell them that – er –'

  'You're away from the lab and I don't know when you'll be back?' he suggested, deadpan.

  'Yes, that's it exactly.' I managed a sketchy smile. 'Cheers, Norman.'

  He smiled broadly back, and my heart twinged to see the kindness in it. 'Not a problem, sir.'

  Tuesday, 7 April 2015. 14:46

  When I eventually got into my office I rattled off a short report in double quick time, and then started dismantling my measuring equipment. That done, I thought I'd take one last look at the 122 before handing it over to Nimesh in the faculty office for safe keeping. I flicked on the kettle on the way past and then unlocked my small safe and took out the plastic box containing 122. It was a piece about the size of a thumbnail, densely black but with traces of the thorium deposit still visible in silvery streaks along its side. Geological samples are often extremely boring-looking pieces of rock but this one had something about it that captivated the eye. I turned it over in my hands, smoothing it, and thought vaguely about the problems this little bit of crystallised mineral had been giving me recently. All those readings, with the blip of missing data sticking out like a sore thumb at low fields – it really looked as if the sample vanished when that happened. I wished I could actually see the damn thing when it took that charge. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I could do just that.

  Why not? I was about to give the bloody thing back anyway, so what would be the harm? For the sort of low magnetic fields I was talking about a simple electromagnet would suffice and I could make one of those in my sleep. I plonked the 122 onto the table and reached out my box of miscellaneous electronic bits, scattering those beside it. A few twists of wire, an LED and – yes – the battery from the phone I'd smashed up in a temper, that would be perfect. I'd assembled the whole, ugly-looking set up in seconds and was holding up to my eye, looking it over for obvious problems before connecting the power supply when a very bright white flash dazzled me, and I froze.

  My mind flew through all the locations of the electrical equipment in the lab – had I left something on, was anything wearing out, what could have fused? But it hadn’t seemed like a fuse-out and the lights and my PC were still working normally. As I stood there, holding my breath, the kettle gently rumbled as it came to the boil and I distinctly heard its safety switch click off. In the following long silence I blinked the flash out of my eyes and looked slowly round, checking everything for signs of burning. It all seemed completely ordinary, except that a small plastic box containing the sample of 122 was sitting innocently in the middle of the workbench.

  I stared at it. It seemed that my brain had totally fused, even if the lights hadn’t, because it took a huge effort to even try and think through some of the possible explanations. Perhaps the flash had been me hitting my head and I’d lost some time? Perhaps I had had a seizure, accounting for the white light. Perhaps... Still staring at the sample of 122 on the bench, I cut my eyes down and looked at the one in my hand. My heart went quite cold: they were exactly the same.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ I think I said.

  Gingerly, I slipped the box I had been holding onto my computer desk and took a gentle step sideways across to the bench to look at the other one more closely. It seemed identical: same slightly tatty plastic box, scuffed from a thousand packed lunches, same twisted copper wires, same flat phone battery... Phone – I fumbled my crappy replacement mobile out of my pocket and quickly took a snap of the little box. As I was leaning in to get a better angle, the single LED lit up and began to blink – making me jump.

  As I watched, the blink rate got faster and faster and then another blinding flash made me step back. I had to shake my head for a few seconds to clear the pink blots on my vision, and when I could see straight one glance told me that the little bit of 122 was gone. I spun round: the plastic box that I had been originally holding was still sitting on my desk with its transuranic cargo inside.

  My heart was racing. I managed to lower myself to the chair and sat there for about fifteen minutes waiting for my hands to stop shaking. I was going crazy: Sarah’s death had tipped me over the edge. I thought that once I’d calmed down I’d go and find Dave and tell him to escort me from the building. There is an absolute no-alcohol rule in the lab, and so I couldn’t settle my nerves with a whisky, but I could and did put the kettle on again by autopilot and I eventually managed to get myself a coffee without spilling anything. A couple of mouthfuls of the hot, bitter liquid and my heart rate started to slow down. My brain, meanwhile, speeded up.

  What had just happened? Obviously, it was most likely that I was going mad, but I was a scientist and so I had a go at thinking about it all logically.

  Setting aside the most likely possibility, that I was losing my mind, the facts appeared to be these: firstly, that the sample of 122 had been in two places at once; secondly, that both appearance and disappearance of the workbench-sample had been preceded by a blinding white flash; and lastly, that (now I went to look) there was a faint scorch mark on the surface of the bench that I knew had not been there before.

  ‘Ok,’ I said to myself, addressing the easiest question first, ‘what would cause the flash and the scorch?’

  Well, the obvious answer was thorium: when ignited it burns at about 3000 degrees centigrade and emits a bright white light. There were traces of thorium on the sides of my sample of 122. But to ignite it you’d have to have a current or – I sat up on the chair and thought very clearly, in other words you’d have to have an electromagnetic field.

  I spun round to the computer and after a few clicks I was looking at a full-screen version of the photo I’d been able to snap on my phone before the mystery 122 had vanished. It looked just like the same plastic box as the one I knew, and the sample itself looked exactly the same size and shape as mine. Zooming in, I realised that the phone battery had indeed been turned into a crude electromagnet by encasing it in twists of copper wire, just as I had been doing before all this happened. I frowned at the screen, and moved the imaging-software’s magnifying glass cursor backwards and forwards across the picture. It came to rest on the battery, and I stared at the words ‘Samsung, made in Korea’ and a dent that was the shape of a fifty pence piece. Wordlessly, I looked up from the screen and stretched round the computer to the box with the crude electromagnet I had been building. I reached in, and pulled out the Samsung battery. Now I came to look, it had a small a dent next to the printed label, a dent shaped like a fifty p.

  Suddenly it was all there in my head: the sample attached to an electromagnet to induce a field of a given duration, as measured by the time it took for the battery to lose its charge. I saw again in my mind’s eye the strange blanks in my recording of 122’s reactions to magnetism and how I'd jokingly thought they showed the sample had vanished from the measuring array. I thought about the energy required to ignite the thorium traces along the edges of the sample.

  It was beautifully simple, but utterly crazy: my sample of element 122 had just travelled in time.

  Tuesday, 7 April 2015: 15:30

  When I next looked at my watch I saw that I had sat in a daze for 17 minutes. I felt quite calm, but cold all over, and I got up and checked again that the lab door was locked. Then I started to pace up and down.

  I was thinking about Cold Fusion. Fleischmann and Pons had announced in 1989 that they had created nuclear fusion at room temperature. An enormous furore ensued, with early excitement giving swiftly way to near-universal condemnation for the researchers who had trumpeted findings that no-one else was able to reproduce. In the years since, the arguments had continued to rage and claims of successful Cold Fusion had become the badge only of charlatans and self-deluders.

  If I told anyone that my sample of element 122 had travelled in time then I would be handing Gilbert the perfect ammunition to close down my lab and disappear my funding. Before I knew it, my services would become surplus to the department’s requirements and I would be
quietly pushed out, only to find that no other Physics department would employ me either. In other words, any announcement of time travelling transuranic elements would immediately become the darling of the crop-circle set and my reputation as a serious physicist would be gone forever.

  On the other hand, what if I was right?

  There seemed only one way to find out. I grabbed the Samsung battery and snapped it into the housing I'd already put together. By my estimation it would only be able to generate the electric field for about four minutes. With a jump I realised that this was the same length of time that the second sample had appeared on the table top. I wasn’t sure if I was creating a field of appropriate strength, but feeling rather circular I just tried to emulate the set-up I could see on the photo on my computer screen.

  When it was done, it took me another six minutes to get up enough nerve to engage the battery. With a gulp, I clicked it into place.

  For a second nothing happened as the charge built, then a pure white thorium flash made me flinch back. By the time I dared looked down at the sample, it simply wasn’t there. I scrabbled to look at my watch, and breathlessly counted down until, four minutes and three seconds later, another flash announced its re-arrival. I turned round, and threw up into the wastepaper basket.

  An hour later I was walking down South Parks Road towards Broad Street. I’d intended to stop at the Kings Arms for a very large drink but my legs just needed to be moving and I found myself crossing over into Exeter Street, then snaking through the small side roads till I reached the Covered Market.

  The crowded, slightly gloomy interior suited my mood. I wove through the narrow lanes, stepping past tourists and locals, looking sightlessly at the shoes and bags and hats and paintings and flowers and pies and fish that were all on display. The unique smell of the market filled my senses, made up of leather and sugar, of pollen and coffee, and blood and sawdust from the butchers with its headless deer hanging in the window.