She switched off her phone and set to work. She had a mammoth task before her. However, it was the kind of task Sandy Jones relished.
Almost ten hours later, at around seven o’clock that evening, Jones rose stiffly from her chair, removed the bottle of malt whisky and one of the glasses she kept tucked away in her bookcase, behind a couple of the weightiest tomes. She poured herself a large tot. Then she walked to the window carrying the glass, and took a long swallow as she gazed unseeingly at the landscaped gardens outside.
She felt drained. Empty. She had known that she would discover something extraordinary. And she’d certainly done that. But Paul Ruders’ Theory of Consciousness was not what she had expected at all.
Jones had been through the paper in its entirety at least three times, scrutinizing every paragraph, every clause, every conclusion. She’d found even the language Paul Ruders had used to be difficult. It was certainly unlike any other scientific language that she had encountered. But she remembered the words of another American pioneer in the field of consciousness, Dean Radin, once a doctor of psychology at Princeton, who had told Jones that when the breakthrough did come the world would probably not have the language in current use to explain it properly.
Radin had likened the sheer monumental leap of faith involved in moving towards an understanding of the meaning of consciousness to the idea of time-hopping a great brain of the seventeenth century, such as Benjamin Franklin, bringing him to the present, then asking him to return to his own time and explain computer technology, even television and telephones, to the people of his age.
‘He would not have the language,’ Radin said. ‘He couldn’t do it.’
Jones had therefore expected Paul Ruders’ paper to be unlike anything she had ever seen and to involve an enormous leap into the unknown. In fact she’d found the language used, both in text and in the mathematics, the equations and the very form of the arithmetic and the phrasing, an enormously difficult challenge.
Ultimately Jones could barely believe her own assessment of Paul Ruders’ Theory of Consciousness. Its implications were more than wide-ranging. They were staggering.
She drained her glass in one. She was not yet satisfied with her efforts. She had to be absolutely sure. She would go through the Ruders Theory at least one more time before leaving her office. And only then would she decide what to do next. If necessary she would stay there all night.
Ed was waiting eagerly for her when she finally arrived home a few minutes before midnight.
‘I kept wanting to phone you,’ he said. ‘But I knew you’d be working.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she replied. ‘I should have called. I didn’t even tell you the package had arrived.’
‘I knew it must have.’
‘Yes. And I’ve been studying it ever since. I lost all track of time. There are one or two surprises, Ed.’
‘Come into the kitchen. I made some sandwiches. We can talk while you eat. I bet you haven’t had anything all day, again.’
Jones nodded absently. She only realized just how hungry she was when she started to eat, and the food, renewing her energy perhaps, somehow made it easier to talk.
Ed sat quietly while she did her best to go through her day’s work, and to describe what she had learned and the conclusions she’d come to. Ed wasn’t a scientist, but his long-time involvement with RECAP meant that she didn’t have to explain in the way she would otherwise have had to. She could take short cuts, throw equations and quite ground-breaking concepts at Ed, and be confident he would understand.
When she’d finished Ed reached across the table and brushed her hand with his fingers. The gesture touched her, even at that moment.
‘What are you going to do, Sandy?’ he asked.
Jones was still fumbling for a reply when the house phone rang. They both looked at the clock. It was just gone one. A little late for a social call.
The caller turned out to be someone from Sandy Jones’s past, an old Oxford acquaintance, whom she knew inhabited a world and moved in circles Jones had never expected to have dealings with. She hadn’t heard from him in years.
Ed looked at her enquiringly after she’d replaced the phone in its charger.
‘I’ve been invited to lunch in London tomorrow,’ she told him. ‘And, trust me, it’s not an invitation you turn down.’
Nonetheless, Jones did not really want to make a trip to London. She hadn’t satisfactorily sorted out her thoughts on the Ruders Theory and what to do about it. She would have liked the chance to talk it all through more with Ed, who was her only confidante. But at least, she felt, as she boarded the 9.05 Exeter to Paddington express, some vital questions might be answered.
The venue chosen for lunch was a surprise. The Ivy restaurant was, by and large, an in-place for in-people, an established celebrity haunt, and Jones did not consider that her lunchtime host was an Ivy sort of man. She would rather have expected to have been offered lunch at the Savoy Grill, or perhaps even more likely, a dusty Mayfair gentleman’s club.
The Honourable Jimmy Cecil, was a man whose background and calling could not have been more different from Jones’s own.
Cecil was the nephew of a peer, and a descendant of one of England’s oldest aristocratic families. He was also, Jones had been vaguely aware for many years, one of the most important men in Britain in terms of national security. But she did not know exactly what it was that Jimmy Cecil did, and was not even entirely sure which security force or government body Cecil was employed by. When Jimmy Cecil had left Oxford he’d talked vaguely in terms of having been seconded to the Ministry of Defence, Jones recalled. In the university’s own corridors of power, which remained considerable, the word had been that he was joining MI5. His name occasionally popped up here and there, usually obliquely, in the columns of the posher papers. And he seemed to hover permanently on the fringes of Government.
Jimmy Cecil was the kind of Englishman whose nature and purpose had not changed in centuries. Even as an Oxford undergraduate, Jones remembered him as a creature apart from the rest.
Cecil was already sitting at a corner table when she arrived, and stood up at once to greet her. He was tall and elegant, with a thick head of prematurely white hair swept back from his forehead in a boyish quiff. He wore a finely tailored, three-piece, pin-striped suit with waistcoat which could only have come from Savile Row, and was of a kind which had been worn by men like him for generations — with barely a button or a cuff altered in deference to whatever might be the current fashion.
‘I say, old girl, haven’t you put the cat amongst the pigeons,’ began Cecil, by way of greeting.
Jones muttered a vague affirmation and sat down.
Cecil poured her a glass of the claret he was already drinking, without asking what she would like, and leaned back in his chair.
‘So terribly good of you to come here all the way from Devon,’ he drawled. ‘I really am so very grateful.’
Jones smiled wryly. As if she would have been able to resist, she thought. Indeed, under the circumstances, as if she would have dared resist.
‘So, why don’t you just tell me why you wanted to see me, Jimmy?’ she asked, being deliberately blunt.
Cecil inclined his head graciously.
‘Oh you know, one thing and another. Saw you on the news, of course. Thought maybe you could do with a helping hand. A bit of advice.’