‘You should get some sleep,’ he says.
I unlock the connecting door between our rooms on my side. He is in the basement switching off the generator. I place the gun ready by the bed. I shall stay awake. And wait to see what he might do.
When the light goes the darkness is so complete there are no walls or ceilings, and the sensation with eyes open or closed is the same, a great floating and turning in space.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The long oblong panels shine down a white fluorescent illumination even and clear over the whole room. They dehydrate colours and cast no shadows so that everybody in the place moves around with no shadow as if in a new dimension. They have begun to cease to exist.
The whispering seems to stop when I turn. I happen to glance at people who are talking and see them look away in another direction furtively. The usual secrecy of the centre has an added intensity. It thickens around me at a certain distance. When I enter rooms or move towards people there is a feeling that new conversations are suddenly begun, and certain subjects are avoided. They no longer mention their wives or children.
Perrin leaves a paper on my desk. The research committee want a report on our work. There have been doom-laden articles in scientific journals about the ethics of genetic engineering: US Experts Warn of ‘Terrible Risks’. There is talk of a departmental investigation.
I am in the car going back to my flat in the winter dark, rain spotting the windscreen and the wipers rhythmically flicking it away, cleaning a space, flicking it away, and I remember the needles on the dials of the sonic frequency machine at the lab flicking across and back time and time again. Then there is a noise, a squeal of a dog and the tyres, and I can hear my own pulse. I come up through the darkness and the doctor says you probably have slight concussion, it wasn’t very serious, just a bump, these tablets will help with the headaches but be careful with them.
Atkinson is driving me back from work until my car is mended. Probably shouldn’t say this but in strictest confidence of course Perrin is a bit worried about you, the strain of, er, and then we have been working very long hours on the project, it’s bound to tell, and you’re due for some leave so why not take a couple of weeks off and have a bit of rest, Bay of Islands, Coromandel, Taupo, somewhere you can get away from it all.
Well, I’ll tell you what I think and I don’t much care if it reaches Perrin’s ears. He wants me out of the way when the next quarterly research committee meeting comes round. No, it’s true. The research grants will be cut next year and he knows his project will get downgraded if he hasn’t produced any results. Whilst I’m away he’ll persuade the D-G to have me transferred back to your section because you’re short-staffed. Then he’ll use my idea for high frequency sound waves and when it works his section will get all the credit.
Oh now I don’t think that’s it at all, I’m sure he has your best interests at heart and there is a bit of concern about the possible effects of high frequency sound waves, well, concern about the effects on basic metabolisms and the resonating of the molecular structure, it’s very much an unknown quantity. And the physicists are worried about this ‘feedback amplification problem’ or whatever they call it, about which we know less than zero—
You’re in on this, aren’t you? He’s put you up to it.
No, for heaven’s sake, it’s not like that. All I’m saying is that now you’ve had this accident with the car and been shaken up a bit, you have a good reason to slip off for a couple of weeks.
I see the truth. I can tell by Atkinson’s tone of voice. I might say the wrong things to the committee; they want me out of the way. Perrin is afraid.
I am in the flat at Takapuna. There is never anybody there. I work later hours and fill the time to avoid having to spend too long in the flat by myself. At weekends I lose track of time altogether. One day I am in a shop and I cannot remember why. One Sunday it is evening and I find myself sitting staring at the wall. For how long? Have I had a meal? I go into the kitchen and check the dishes in the sink to try to work out if I have had a meal because I cannot remember. The plates have piled up. It is not possible to tell. One evening I wake in front of the television and a singer comes on and I shout for Joanne to come in because he is her favourite singer. Of course Joanne is not there. I am aware of what is happening.
Then one day at work there is a mistake. The frequency setting on the sound modulator is turned from low, B1, to much higher, B10, which is easy to do because the figures look similar and the decimal points are not clear. Inside the radiation chamber I have samples of DNA molecules from a range of viruses, fungi and bacteria, and from selected insects, birds, and animals, including human samples.
It should be quite straightforward. I am alone in the radiation unit and the door is closed. I switch on. The samples have already been irradiated. The insulating headphones clamped over my ears register the tonal signal of the frequency. I know immediately the setting is wrong. But in the instant it takes to reach up and switch off, I feel something gigantic happen, something which seems to stop time and rush through the structure of the room and the cells of my blood and the inside of my skull. It waves me aside like a wing beating past. The sound is a great slam of reverberating white noise in the distance of somewhere else altogether, another universe, far beyond the frequency of what animals can hear and see; unimaginable. Even as it happens I can feel that it’s still only a hint of something even more immense, a near miss in the dark from a pitch-dark force like a locomotive the size of a planet brushing past the front of my face. Because it seems to be both inside and outside me at the same moment the feeling is dreamlike, of being lifted and shaken in sleep. But I manage to switch off. The whole impulse must have lasted less than a second.
The room has gone suffocatingly quiet. The floor is sliding and leaning up against me, banging my arm and side and then pressing on my back. The long oblong panels shine down from the ceiling above very even and clear. They cast no shadows. People appear. They move strangely. Their faces look down at me.
Then Perrin is saying you have been working too hard, either you go on leave or the department will have to temporarily suspend you. The words are rehearsed. His face seems already dead, the skin a cellophane wrapping over a pack of dehydrated meat.
The electron micrograph pictures show that I must have forgotten to place at least half the taxonomically diverse organisms in the radiation chamber, because the molecules of Bacillus megaterium, at .60 on the ratio scale, and the fungus Aspergillus niger at 1.00, and all the other bacteria and viruses, are structurally normal, but the slides of the DNA samples from insects, at 1.41, animals, birds, and human beings, all in the range from 1.36 to 1.40, are completely blank. The machine cannot be faulty because it registers the lower organisms.
I know I may be unable to remember. I have to admit to myself, as well as to Perrin, that I cannot be absolutely certain. So he has what he wants at last, and I shall go on leave, after checking and rechecking the slides that show nothing. Because if I am not at fault, then the entire structure of biomolecular science falls apart and all my work falls with it. I have been feeding years and years of effort into an idiot’s waste bin. It has been my whole life. And I have given up much more than any of the others; very much more. This was my only area of certainty, a clean world in a capsule where there were clear rules and no shadows, all sealed and protected against the outside, like me; it was all I could rely on. Had I uncovered a black hole at the heart of it?