It was all totally seductive for the girl from the wrong side of the track. In just a brief few days she fell head over heels in love, for the first time in her young life. And her head was totally turned. She realized also that what O’Grady had could possibly also be hers, that maybe she could be a part of that world. Indeed, amongst the high-flying media people he introduced her to was the TV executive who would one day offer Sandy Jones her first opportunity in broadcasting.
She quickly learned that O’Grady, who was fourteen years her senior, had a reputation for being an inveterate womanizer, but she didn’t care. It would be different with her. She would change him.
On the day before she was due to return to Princeton she was formally offered the Goldsmith research fellowship and accepted it on the spot. She travelled back to Princeton merely to collect her belongings and formally receive her doctorate.
She told Ed as little as possible, indicating disingenuously that the Goldsmith position was not a permanent one, and she had made no long-term decision.
She certainly did not mention that she’d fallen heavily in love with another man.
Ed appeared to take the news well enough, even congratulating her on her appointment, but she could only suspect what he was really feeling, this quiet, genuine man who had been her very best friend for four years, and whom she knew loved her in a manner she had never quite been able to reciprocate.
‘Just say the word and I’ll come and join you,’ he’d remarked lightly.
‘Oh, I’ll be back before you know it,’ she’d replied, knowing full well that was another lie, and that she was almost certainly about to break Ed’s heart.
She realized that she was being cowardly, but she couldn’t face telling him that their relationship was over.
Ultimately she only remained in Princeton for a few days, during which she avoided Connie, and all concerned with the RECAP project, as much as possible, merely letting them know casually that she would not be staying in Princeton after all. She was vaguely aware that Connie and Paul, Connie in particular, were deeply disappointed. But, at that moment in time, Jones didn’t care.
Back in England, she at once became so immersed in her new life that Princeton and most of what had happened there slipped swiftly into a compartment at the very back of her mind. She and Connie kept in touch, but she very soon broke off all communication with Ed. Without a word of explanation. Not least because she had no idea what to say to him. She knew how shabbily she was behaving, but didn’t seem able to stop herself. She was already pregnant. Unlike with Ed, she and O’Grady had never taken any precautions. She didn’t even remember the subject being mentioned. The whole thing was crazy. But quite wonderfully so. At first.
O’Grady divorced his wife, not only with unseemly haste, but also with apparent ease. Jones eagerly agreed to marry him as soon as he was free. The birth of their twin sons, Lee and Matt, led her new husband to commend her on her efficiency in producing an instant family. For a brief period she took a break from her academic work, and was blissfully happy caring for her new babies, and basking in the love of her charismatic husband. Or that’s how she saw things. But in what seemed like no time at all, O’Grady’s perennially roving eye reasserted itself, and alighted upon a research assistant even younger, and certainly prettier, than his wife. History repeated itself. Within three years Sandy found herself divorced and bringing up her sons largely on her own.
Only then, not infrequently besieged by a terrible sense of emptiness, did her thoughts turn to Princeton again, and she would experience the dull ache of regret, and an overwhelming longing for what might have been.
Two decades later, flying across the Atlantic in the aftermath of tragedy, the memories were suddenly startlingly vivid, including her shameful behaviour when she had so carelessly cast it all aside.
And it caused Sandy Jones more pain than she would ever have believed to know that Connie and Paul were dead. That she would never see either of them again.
Their work had mushroomed, of course, beyond Paul and Connie’s original dreams. The computer age and the Internet had seen to that. Jones knew there were now more than a hundred Random Events Generators throughout the world, more than a million series of laboratory condition tests had been completed, producing literally billions of trials, all with similar results to those achieved at RECAP from the beginning.
These REGs, sometimes known as RNGs, or Random Number Generators, were installed at various accepted academic and scientific establishments not only across America but in all five continents, in cities as diverse as Beijing and Edinburgh, Tokyo and Sydney, Amsterdam and Moscow. All of them were linked to a database at RECAP, the home and the heart of the Global Consciousness Project, under Paul’s directorship. Or rather, they had been until the lab had been destroyed and Paul killed.
They weren’t Heath Robinson boxes any more. Nowadays a REG was a USB device, not much bigger than a standard memory stick, which merely plugged into the appropriate computer outlet. And many of those who had installed them worldwide — often post-graduate students yet to be pressurized into moving away from such a controversial area of science — were initially sceptics, just as Jones had been to begin with. Often, they barely believed the results of their own experiments. Yet they were united in being convinced of the accuracy, and also in believing that the Global Consciousness Project was at the very least nipping at the ankles of something quite extraordinary and revolutionary.
In spite of that, RECAP had remained ever under pressure, always under some sort of threat, usually financial. Jones was acutely aware of how much she could have helped the project over the years, had she wished to do so. But they’d never asked for her help — not until Connie’s call of a few days ago, that is — and she had never offered it.
Yet now, when it was probably too late, certainly too late for Connie and Paul, she was jetting off to the rescue. And a good half of her didn’t know what the hell she thought she was doing, nor indeed who the hell she thought she was. A cross, perhaps, between Wonder Woman and her near namesake, Indiana Jones?
At times during the journey she tried to sleep but largely failed, her brain racing as she began to consider the task ahead. Whatever exactly that might prove to be.
She didn’t even know if her dead friends had any relatives. Paul had been a widower, and Jones was aware that his only child had died very young. As for Connie, well, to her shame, Jones realized that she’d never known anything much about Connie Pike’s personal life, beyond the fact that she had been married as a young woman and quite swiftly divorced. She had no idea what relationships Connie may or may not have had since then. It had always seemed to her that Connie’s whole existence revolved around RECAP and those who were involved with the project. She’d always been there for Sandy Jones, and for the others. But, looking back, it had all been rather one sided. Which, perhaps led to the real reason why Sandy Jones was on this aircraft. She felt so guilty about so much.
The instructions were given to fasten seat belts for landing. Jones decided that all she could do now was to take things step by step.
At JFK she would grab a yellow cab to New York’s Penn Station and then catch a train on to that so familiar other-worldly university town. Newark would have been a more convenient airport to fly into en route to Princeton, but there had been no suitable flight available.
She checked her watch. The flight was due to arrive at four thirty p.m. and appeared to be on time. If she was lucky she could be at Penn by around six. The train journey to Princeton Junction would take just over an hour, the trains were frequent, and Jones was travelling light with only hand luggage, just the one capacious shoulder bag.