It was in the Collège de France, working down the corridor from Pierre and Marie Curie, that Gurwitsch achieved the breakthrough that would, for better and for worse, immortalise his name: the Gurwitsch ray.
A colour all his own!
What he had in fact found was a weak ultraviolet pulse, passing from cell to cell. Living tissues emit light. This was a significant finding, but not unexpected. What was unexpected – indeed, revolutionary – was Gurwitsch’s leap of faith: that it was this self-generated light, this ‘biophotonic ray’, that was orchestrating development. Why do birds give birth to birds, and dogs to dogs, and cats to cats? Because, said Gurwitsch, every species emits its own special ray.
Easy to say; harder to prove. Anyway, Gurwitsch’s discovery had to join the queue. There were altogether too many newfangled rays abroad. Every ambitious physicist in middle Europe was touting a ray of some kind. X-rays, N-rays. It took time to sort the wheat from all this hopeful chaff.
But in the end—!
At an international conference held at the Ukrainian animal breeding station at Askania-Nova, on the eve of the war that would consume a generation and irradiate a continent, Alexander Gurwitsch was ready to declare, not only that the biophotonic ray was real, but that he had already taken the first steps to control it. Biophotonics, he declared, would give the next generation the ability ‘to sculpt organic forms at will’ – no small promise to make to men and women scarred, as Gurwitsch was scarred, by memories of the ten-year Yellowstone Winter.
‘In the near future, man will expose foetal material to a finely tuned and targeted ultraviolet ray, synthesising such forms as are entirely unknown in nature,’ he declared. ‘Biological synthesis is becoming as much a reality as chemical.’
This was Gurwitsch’s promise – nothing less than ‘the planned and rational utilisation of the living resources of the terrestrial globe’.
No one standing and applauding him that day had the slightest idea how badly this was going to go. The speciation of mankind. The Great War and its battlefields. The all-too-many undead.
So the whole sorry history of the twentieth century unpacks itself, leaving the appointment slip, wilted, crumpled in your hand.
When you think about it (and you do think about it, all the way down the wooded valley and in under the filthy milk-waves, past factories of cold smoke and the shop-floor smell of suds and hot metal, through the town’s smutted streets to your father’s front door), who’s to say, with medical science being what it is these days, that cancer will not turn out to be the product of some virulent biophotonic ray?
Of course, there’s no earthly way you can talk to your father about this.
You enter the house without knocking. Bob is having his weekly wash in a tin bath by the fire. Bob: a man made of sticks, reduced by age to the gawkiness of a teenager. Strong, but somehow… whittled. You go through to the kitchen, giving him his privacy. You fill a kettle and boil it on the hob, and while the tea mashes you fish around in the bread tin, fetch out a stale nub and try to turn it to good account; damned thing near snaps a tooth. Through the half-closed door you ask your father how his day has gone. He replies, ‘A thousand turned.’ His voice, full of pieceworker’s pride, now admits a new and discordant note: the defensive vocal tremor of an ageing man pitted against the young.
And they are so young! Many of them cannot remember a time before the spaceships. When Bob started there, his factory was making frames for ladies’ bicycles.
‘We need bread, Dad.’
‘Chippie’ll have some.’
You hear him clamber from the bath. The quick thwacking of a thin towel over tight, hard limbs. His footsteps on the stairs, surprisingly fleet as the weekend approaches. This has been Bob’s life: cares tumble off him on a Friday night only to pile redoubled upon his thick and aching head come Sunday morning. A few hours’ fishing in the beck above the old wheels will put his mood right by Sunday afternoon and ready for the week ahead: a week of numbing, repetitive labour in the factory. Fishing, though, is a summer occupation. The rest of the time, or kept indoors by the weather, he can only mope.
You bring out his tea and your own and set the mugs on the mantelpiece. Two tall cones of condensation form on the mirror behind, apparitions rising to occupy the room that lies beyond the glass. When your dad comes down he’s wearing his suit, a grey shirt with a collar and shoes bought in Leeds less than a year ago. Around his wrist is the watch Jim left him for safe-keeping two Christmases past: the one from the flight school in Peenemünde, with the logo from Frau im Mond surfing starlight on its engraved underside.
‘Christ, Dad.’
His face falls a little. You have embarrassed him, and well may you want to kick yourself. Now you are going to have to talk him, stage by painful stage, back into whatever holiday mood overtook him, that he has put on his best clothes for an evening of fish and chips by the canal. He dressed hardly finer the day he and your mum first waved you off to London, a scholarship under your arm and a promise of digs at your aunt’s house in Islington. What is there for Bob to celebrate now?
It is not impossible that he’s simply glad to see the back of you for a few days. These have been trying months, the pair of you without companions. Abandoned Lanyon and his singleton son have been hanging out their washing in the yard on a Wednesday night when any housewife, sensitive to the changing currents of the town, could have told them the Wednesday air runs foul from the shipyards.
Fish is brought on ice from Whitby twice a week to Hebden Bridge, and from there it is carried across the valleys of the Calder, from Mankinholes to Hipperholme, by cart and lorry and bike, even to the very ends of Jerusalem (or at any rate to Jerusalem Avenue, where it intersects with Dry Cart Lane). Were you able to map this distribution of wet fish on a screen such as the wizards of the Bund employ, you might say, in something approaching wonderment, that this is a great transmigration of sorts: how the corpses of fish move through the upper air, and up, and up, even to the giddy heights of Mount Tabor, three miles north-west of Halifax. There, on that busy, deceiving (and for you, incomprehensible) handheld device, would be evidence of the land’s invasion by the sea.
‘With chips.’
‘Right you are, Mr Lanyon.’
‘Twice.’
Bob’s futile noblesse oblige has him ordering, in nice detail, the only dish the shop can possibly serve, since fresh pies won’t be delivered before the morning and they’re out of pickled eggs. Bob has a weak man’s habit of standing on his dignity. ‘We’ll sit here by the window.’
‘Right you are.’
Bob wants you to tell him what things you plan to bring back from London: how much in hand luggage and how much by the van. Hard to imagine that you’ll need a van at all, unless you were to ship your drawing table home. ‘Which,’ you explain, ‘what with petrol and the hire, would make it the most expensive drawing table in the whole of Yorkshire.’
‘But if you need it, lad—’