Madhusree had to fight to contain her enthusiasm. ‘These are amazing discoveries—just like the butterflies, but who knows how many species are involved now? And there is no explanation. There’s no way of making sense of this. Whatever the cause turns out to be, it’s going to shake up biology like nothing since Wallace.’ Madhusree would have none of this Darwin nonsense; Alfred Wallace might have been too much of a doormat to take the credit he was due, but that wasn’t going to stop her putting the record straight.
Prabir was numb. ‘You didn’t tell anyone? About the butterflies?’ The reports made no mention of any earlier find; apparently neither his parents’ academic colleagues in Calcutta, nor their sponsor at Silk Rainbow had felt inclined to volunteer anecdotal evidence about their unpublished work.
Madhusree said, ‘I probably should have, but I was afraid they’d suspect I was making it up just to get in on the act.’ She smiled proudly. ‘But I’m on the team by merit alone. I even said “no” on the questionnaire when they asked about “jungle experience”.’ She mused, ‘Maybe the best thing would be for me to keep my mouth shut, and let the expedition stumble on the evidence. I mean, the huts should still be standing, and most of the equipment should be recognisable. There might even be some records intact.’
Prabir regarded her stonily. She took his hand and said, ‘Don’t you think they’d be glad if one of us went back? Now that it’s safe?’ Prabir felt a chill at the base of his spine: whether by choice or out of habit, she’d slipped into the hushed voice she’d used when they’d talked about their parents in his room at Amita’s.
He said, ‘It’s not safe. Why do you think it’s safe?’
Madhusree examined his face. ‘Because the war’s been over for almost eighteen years.’
Prabir pulled his hand free, irritated. ‘Yeah, and there are lunatics in government in West Papua—’
‘I’m not going to West Papua—’
‘Who want to claim half the islands—’
‘That’s nowhere near where we’re going!’
Prabir’s head was beginning to pound. If this wasn’t a dream, it was some kind of test. He’d brought her to safety, and now she was standing on the edge of the cliffs, babbling childish nonsense about diving back into the water.
He said, ‘There are still mines on those islands. Do you think someone’s gone through and de-mined them all?’
Madhusree rummaged through files, then waved her notepad at the TV. ‘You strap this device to your belt. If there’s any chemical explosive within twenty metres, it tells you.’
The gadget was about as big as a matchbox. Prabir said, ‘I don’t believe you. Buried explosives? How? You know the Indonesians had NQR-aware mines? If you send out a radio pulse, they’ll triangulate your position and give you a gut full of shrapnel.’
‘It doesn’t use Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance; it’s entirely passive. There’s a radiation signature from the explosive: secondary particles emitted from the constituent atoms due to background and cosmic radiation.’
‘And… that thing’s sensitive enough to identify chemical composition from secondary radiation?’
Madhusree nodded earnestly.
Prabir stared at the screen, feeling like a doddering centenarian who’d blinked and missed a decade. ‘I’ve been in banking too long.’
‘Isn’t that a tautology?’
Prabir laughed, and felt something tearing inside. He could give in; it would be easy. He could shout, ‘Go! Go!’ and dance around the room with her, playing proud supportive big brother. Then she’d fly off to salvage her parents’ reputation and complete their work, like a fairy-tale princess returning from exile to right all wrongs and avenge all injustices.
He said, ‘I can’t afford it.’
‘I’m sorry?’
He turned to her. ‘Five thousand dollars? I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t even have that much in my account. And without collateral…’ He raised his hands apologetically.
Madhusree bit her lip and eyed him with frank disbelief, but Prabir was almost certain that she wouldn’t call his bluff. She might have argued all weekend about the risks the expedition would face, but she wouldn’t make a scene over money.
She said, ‘OK. I knew it was a lot. I’ll have to see about raising it some other way.’
‘Some other way? How long do you have?’
‘Two months.’
Prabir frowned sympathetically. ‘So what were you thinking of doing?’
Madhusree shrugged and said casually, ‘I’ve got some ideas. Don’t worry about it.’ She stood and left the room abruptly.
Prabir put his face in his hands. He hated lying to her, but he was certain now that he’d made the right decision. Even if there really was some revolutionary discovery waiting to be made on the island—and not just a very unpleasant mutagen that left a vast number of stillborn victims rotting in the jungle for every spectacular survivor—she could read about it like everyone else.
That would make her angry. But it wouldn’t kill her.
‘Are you sure it’s all right for me to be here?’ Felix’s work room looked like a biology lab in which an eclectic art thief had stashed a few million dollars’ worth of stolen goods. Prabir didn’t recognise any of the paintings awaiting assessment, hanging in a rack like posters in a shop, but the richness of the pigments and the skill of the execution was enough to make him nervous just being near them. ‘I don’t want to get you into trouble.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’ Felix was glued to a microscope, manually removing the last flakes of corrosion from an arrowhead after electrochemical treatment. ‘We have visitors back here all the time. You can’t steal anything; the building’s too smart. Try swallowing one of those coins and see how far you get.’
‘No, it’s the frog collection that’s starting to look tempting.’
Felix groaned. ‘I know, the booking’s for nine. I won’t be much longer.’
Prabir watched him working, envious and admiring. Anything involving fine visual detail was tricky for Felix, but with stationary objects he could build up a mental picture with higher resolution than the electrode sheet provided at any given moment, accumulating extra data as his eyes swept back and forth across the scene. Apparently the process had become partly instinctive, but it still required a certain amount of sheer doggedness, a constant mental effort to maintain the model in his head.
Prabir said, ‘I wish I’d met you nine years ago.’
Felix replied without looking up. ‘I was fifteen. You would have gone to prison.’
‘This is a hypotheticaclass="underline" we both get to be eighteen.’
‘That would have been even worse. You wouldn’t have wanted to know me then.’
Prabir laughed. ‘Why?’
‘Oh… I did a lot of stupid things.’
‘Like what?’
Felix didn’t respond immediately; Prabir wasn’t sure whether the question discomforted him, or whether he was merely concentrating on his work. ‘I used to go out with the sheet off, just to prove I didn’t need it. To convince myself that I could have lived a hundred years ago, and still got by.’
‘What’s so stupid about that?’
‘It wasn’t true. I’d grown up with it, I didn’t have the skills to cope without it. I knew that, but I kept pushing my luck.’ He laughed. ‘I met this guy in a club one night. He hung around talking to me for about three hours. There was a lot of touching: hands on shoulders, guiding me through the crowd. Nothing overtly sexual, but it was more than just polite. He was pretty evasive, but after a while I was almost certain that he was coming on to me—’
‘Three hours of this, and he wasn’t?’