It was, of course, a much greater relief to Cecil that there was actually no effective Theory of Consciousness in existence, and, it seemed, never had been. Neither RECAP, nor any other of the world’s scientists, had yet managed to solve humanity’s greatest mystery after all.
As far as Cecil was concerned that was good news. The status quo would continue. The people of the world were not going to rise as one against their governments, not for the time being anyway. Cecil had believed for years that one day there would be an almighty sea change. After all, there was little doubt that the vast majority of individuals in the vast majority of countries no longer had much belief or confidence in those who ruled their lives.
Jimmy Cecil was a realist. Jimmy Cecil was a pragmatist. He knew about people, and the way their minds worked. He believed it was absurd to suppose that existence could only be physical. And he had little doubt that the scientific community would one day solve the mystery of consciousness, thus taking a conceptual leap which would be far greater even than the leap from the power of fire to that of nuclear energy.
Meanwhile, Cecil remained devoted to the traditions of conventional government. He remained convinced that any dramatic change in what he regarded to be the natural order of things would lead to a total breakdown in international order, and should be held at bay for as long as possible.
By and large, Jimmy Cecil liked the world just how it was, and intended to continue to do all he could to keep it that way.
Marmaduke Johnson sat alone in his White House office, a small austere room tucked away in an almost forgotten corner. Naturally the president, although highly unlikely ever to publicly recognize his existence, knew where to find him. So did the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and a number of others, similarly eminent, who would also deny that he existed.
Jimmy Cecil had been absolutely right of course. Johnson had made sure Mikey emailed him a copy of the Ruders Theory right at the very beginning. Just in case. Duke Johnson believed it was his job to ensure that both he and America were always a step ahead.
When he’d heard from Cecil that the paper was not what had been believed, that the Ruders Theory did not stand up, Johnson had decided on a second opinion. After all, Duke Johnson didn’t trust anybody. And he certainly didn’t trust Jimmy Cecil, even though the two men, and a small group of others like them worldwide, had been supposed to be working as a team over the RECAP affair.
Apart from Connie Pike, there were two, maybe three, scientists in the world who were capable of judging Paul Ruders’ work. Johnson had called in the one he thought might be most attracted to the material gain he would be able to put his way, and had presented the paper as if he believed it were genuine. Less than a week later the somewhat bewildered scientist had confirmed that the theory was, to put it bluntly, nonsense.
Ruders, and that mad woman who’d worked with him, had just been crazy eccentrics, it seemed, believing in the impossible, deluding themselves. Paul Ruders had had an excuse, Johnson supposed. He’d been suffering from Alzheimer’s. But Johnson still couldn’t understand what made the other one tick. It had been Connie Pike who’d supplied the copy of Ruders’ work to Mikey. And, as probably the second most foremost figure in the field, nobody had suspected a thing when she’d confirmed its authenticity.
Johnson lit another black cheroot from the stub of the one he had already been smoking. Nobody else smoked in the White House, as far as he knew — and, of course, if they did, he would know. But Marmaduke Johnson’s world was a thing apart, a place where he, and only he, made up the rules as he went along.
The little room was hazy with smoke. Johnson liked that, an unsavoury fog providing the illusion of yet another screen behind which he could conceal himself from the prying eyes of democracy.
He leaned back in his chair and inhaled deeply.
With the wonderful benefit of hindsight he wondered how on earth he could have fallen for any of the RECAP mumbo jumbo in the first place.
Unlike Jimmy Cecil, Marmaduke Johnson was not inclined to believe in anything much that he couldn’t see with his own eyes, right in front of him, and preferably reach out and touch.
Sandy Jones was at home in Northdown House enjoying an early-evening gin and tonic and a wonderful wintry sunset over the sea, and looking forward to the next day more than she had looked forward to anything in what felt like a very long time.
Three months had passed since the RECAP explosion and all that followed. Life had moved on. In the morning Jones and her twin sons would be flying to New York together to spend Christmas there. She was paying, of course. She didn’t mind. She hadn’t seen nearly enough of Matt and Lee lately.
She was also hoping to see something of Ed MacEntee. They had been keeping in touch regularly, mostly via Facetime. The old friendship, so easy and natural, had definitely been fully restored. Whether or not the old love affair could ever be resurrected still remained to be seen. Jones was beginning to hope quite strongly that it could.
These were comfortable thoughts. But she also couldn’t stop thinking about Connie, which was not nearly so comfortable. At first Jones had been so angered by what Connie Pike had done, and had felt so let down by her, that she hadn’t been able to be objective.
Since then, as she’d expected would happen, somebody somewhere had leaked to the press that the Ruders Theory didn’t stand up. That it was gobbledygook. And eventually sections of the unfortunate piece of work had turned up in various newsrooms. Jones wondered if Jimmy Cecil had been responsible for that. If not, it had been somebody rather like him, she suspected.
Predictably a certain amount of the newspaper flak which followed had been directed at Jones as well as Connie, but most of the thrust in the press still focused on the question of whether or not there had been a major conspiracy and at what level. There was speculation, accurate speculation as it happened, that the security forces and various relevant government departments which may have been involved hadn’t known the theory was worthless. However, the American government ignored that, and instead presented the revelation as proof that there had been no conspiracy. The discrediting of the Ruders Theory surely removed any possible reason for there ever having been one, it was argued.
Three months on, the White House spin doctors continued to stick like glue to the original assertion that the Princeton bombing had been instigated by animal rights campaigners, and the RECAP lab destroyed by chance. It was also claimed that Marion Jessop had been accidentally mown down by a hit-and-run driver yet to be traced — which made no sense, of course. Jones had seen the incident. There had been other witnesses. And the lethal Chevy truck had returned for a second go. But this was attributed to its driver panicking, and as Jones was now keeping her head down and neither Connie nor Marion stepped forward to contradict anything, the new official version stood.
Jones had decided that the best thing to do under the circumstances was to step back from it all. The revelation that the Ruders Theory was worthless had not done her reputation any good, because it was she who had first gone public about the theory and claimed that there was a major conspiracy over it.
However, three months was a long time in the world of science. And, fortunately, it seemed that both the media and her colleagues in academia now took the attitude that her earlier outburst had been prompted only by loyalty to old friends — misguided, perhaps, but mildly laudable, all the same.
Jones was still going to be installed as Chancellor of Oxford in the New Year, although she’d heard on the grapevine that there had indeed been those amongst the university’s hierarchy who’d made it clear that they would have liked to overturn the vote of the Convocation had they been able to do so.