‘I see.’
Jones turned away from the REG to directly face Connie.
‘Right, then. See you tomorrow? Same time, same place? And let’s go for the full series of 5000 trials in a block of one hundred runs, shall we?’
Connie Pike raised her eyebrows in surprise, but this time Jones wasn’t so sure that her behaviour was genuine. She must be well accustomed to the affect she, her project, and her unlikely laboratory had on people, Jones reckoned. Converting sceptics was probably her house speciality.
‘Abso-damned-lutely!’ said Connie.
She showed Jones to the door, then put a restraining hand on her arm.
‘Wait.’
Connie turned on her heel, disappeared into her office for just a few seconds, and returned carrying a blue button badge, just like the one she was wearing.
Smiling she pinned it to one of the lapels of Jones’s denim jacket.
‘Have a good evening,’ she said.
‘You too,’ Jones replied, touching the badge with the fingers of one hand. ‘And thanks for this.’
Once outside she remembered the time, the all too pressing thesis she had to complete, and the fact that she’d only visited RECAP to keep Ed happy.
‘I must be going barking mad,’ she muttered to herself as she hurried along the corridor and out into the grounds en route to the main building. When she reached the entrance hall, she unpinned the little blue badge Connie had given her, held it in the palm of her hand and looked at it.
‘Subvert the Dominant Paradigm.’
She muttered the words aloud, wondering what it was about Connie Pike, and the whole RECAP project, that was sucking her in so quickly.
Nonetheless, she then tucked the little button badge into her jeans’ pocket. She might be turning into a psi freak, but she had no intention of advertising the fact.
Five
From that very first visit to the RECAP lab, flattered by the possibility of being a particularly receptive operator, captivated by Connie Pike, in awe of Paul Ruders, whom she came to believe really was a genius, Jones was hooked.
Until nearly the end of her four-year stint at Princeton she spent much of her spare time at the RECAP lab, endlessly operating trials on the REG, correlating results, making up graphs. And always working in the dark, with little idea really either of what was likely to be achieved or even of what it may be possible to achieve, yet nonetheless enthralled by the prospect of what might be.
The secret of consciousness, the last great mystery of the human race. Most people, Jones realized, had a story to tell of sensing something strange, or of an awareness of a situation or an event which contemporary science could not explain. Being aware of eyes staring at you, even from behind your back, was perhaps the most common experience, followed closely by having some kind of knowledge of the death or injury of a loved one in another place. But all these stories, at the end of the day, were merely the kind of anecdote that had been related and passed on throughout the ages.
The trials being conducted at Princeton and elsewhere, as initiated by Paul Ruders, were something different. This was valid correlated scientific exploration. At the beginning Jones, always a sceptic at heart, looked everywhere for flaws in the way the various tests were conducted. She could find none. Just as Connie had told her in the beginning, all RECAP experiments were governed by the strictest of laboratory conditions.
She therefore came to the conclusion that the results of the RECAP trials were inarguable.
Yet they remained inexplicable. Paul Ruders never seemed to doubt that one day the mystery of consciousness would be solved, but he didn’t say a lot. Connie, on the other hand, talked enough for both of them. And always colourfully.
‘Chasing the rainbow,’ was how she usually referred to the ultimate aims of RECAP.
‘Do you realize we could find what we are looking for and not even know it?’ she remarked one night when she and Jones were alone together in the lab in the early hours, Professor Ruders, the by-then at least partially house-trained Lulu trotting along behind him, having finally gone home to his wife.
‘I’ll know,’ Jones replied at once.
Connie raised both eyebrows.
‘Not short of confidence are you, Sandy?’
‘Maybe not,’ Jones replied. ‘Mind you, I was absolutely confident that I would never in my life get involved in anything like RECAP.’
‘Well, we’re all very glad you did,’ Connie told her.
And Jones felt a warm glow in her belly.
The glittering academic career to which Sandy Jones aspired, was a world away from the psi experimentation of RECAP, and she was aware that her association with the programme might be regarded by the academic establishment as the only blot on an otherwise exemplary residency at Princeton. But she continued to risk it, ignoring the odd puzzled frown from the hierarchy. The REG programme fascinated her. She couldn’t leave it alone.
However, ultimately the natural conflict between the hard fact of her ambition and the seductive vagary of RECAP led to Jones having to make a choice. A choice, deep inside, that she had probably always known, was inevitable.
During her final year at Princeton, she began to think seriously about her immediate future. The American university was rich, both in material wealth and in opportunity. She had been left in little doubt that there were openings within its diverse employment structure which were hers for the taking. And she and Ed had somehow drifted into discussions about their joint future, almost as if that were inevitable. Nobody proposed marriage, but Ed did mention casually more than once that if she married him, the resulting American citizenship would remove any obstacles there might be to her enjoying a high-flying career in the States. Then, towards the end of her last semester, when her final thesis had been completed and her doctorate was about to be bestowed, she learned that she was being considered for a particularly sought-after research fellowship back in the UK, at London’s Goldsmith College. It was a position considerably more senior than would usually be offered to a newly qualified doctor, and one which she knew would open the door to the most elevated areas of British and international academia.
She told Ed that she wasn’t sure if she wanted it, which was a lie, and that she didn’t think she would get it anyway, which was true. And she reminded him that acquiring nationality by marriage worked both ways round, which she really shouldn’t have done because she had absolutely no intention of marrying Ed MacEntee.
She flew back to London to meet the Goldsmith hierarchy, and it was there that Professor Michael O’Grady came into her life. He was probably Britain’s top biologist, not only was he brilliant, and a TV star with his own BBC Two series, The World Around Us, but he was also handsome, and oozed Irish charm. He was known as Dr Darling. And Sandy was later to wonder how she had failed to realize immediately that he had to be too good to be true.
Instead, she fell under his spell from the beginning, and, even though he had made no secret of being a married man, allowed herself to be seduced by him that very first night. O’Grady was everything Ed wasn’t. He was an accomplished and passionate lover, and the sex was by far the best Sandy Jones had ever experienced. She hadn’t realized that she could care about it that much. But during those few days in London, O’Grady overwhelmed her, physically and in every way. When they weren’t in bed, he whisked her off to the best restaurants in town, to a reception at 10 Downing Street, and to a garden party at Buckingham Palace.