Hamilton, Peter F – Quantum Murder, A

‘I was in Birmingham when the PSP rule started. I didn’t come back here until seven years ago. But no, I can’t remember anything. Kitchener himself got the occasional mention, of course. Some of the scientific papers he published were contested by other scientists. Frankly, there were more important issues at the time. We didn’t give him a lot of coverage. What type of incident were you looking for?’ ‘I don’t know.’ She rose to leave. ‘By the way, our deal stands.’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘So as a final favour, could you tell me if there is anywhere else we could go that might have records of that period?’ ‘It pains me to say it, but you might try our rivals, the Rutland Tаnes, or the Meiwn Times, possibly even the Leicester Mercury’ CHAPTER TWENTY

J on Nevin showed his card to the lock, and the bolts clicked back. ‘Thanks,’ Greg said as he walked into the cell. There was no response. Back to square one, he thought. He pretended be wasn’t bothered by the detective’s attitude. Nicholas Beswick was sitting cross-legged in the middle of his cot. He opened his eyes as Greg came in, but made no attempt to move. The boy had undergone a profound change in the last three days, there was no sign of the angst-burdened student Greg had interviewed at the start of the inquiry. He ordered a secretion from his gland, and examined the smooth cadence of Nicholas’s thought currents. Again there was virtually no trace of the old jittery mind. Maybe it was a good thing, that earlier Nicholas would have been crucified under cross-exnmination by a professional prosecutor. But Greg couldn’t help thinking that if the boy had changed so drastically once… ‘I don’t know who is the most unpopular at this station right now,’ he said, ‘you or me.’ Nicholas favoured him with a sly smile, a welcome from one conspirator to another. ‘It’s me. You only irritate them. I disgust them.’ ‘Yeah. What you did this morning was a bit over the top, wasn’t it? Sending your sister as well as your parents. You upset Eleanor, you know.’ ‘Exactly how many qualms should a condemned man own? I need you, very badly. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to reach you.’ ‘Jesus.’ ‘I know what you’re thinking. He’s changed so much, A QUANTUM MURDER 293 attitude-wise. If he’s done it once, could he do it twice? That’s right, isn’t it?’ Greg grinned, and pulled the single wooden chair into the middle of the cell, straddling it saloon style, with his elbows resting on its back. ‘You really have got a brain in that head of yours, haven’t you?’ ‘Not good enough to think me out of here.’ ‘That’s a fact, and no messing.’ ‘But you’re going to work on the case again, aren’t you? Mum said you were. She came back at lunchtime, her and Emma. I didn’t know my parents were going to bring Emma with them. She’s a lovely girl, we get on really well. Can you think how they’re going to treat her at school after this? God!’ Just for a moment the old Nicholas peeped through, insecure and desperate. ‘Yeah. I’m still on the case. There are a couple of ambiguities that are bothering me. But, Nicholas, if I clear them up and you still look guilty, an army of weeping relatives isn’t going to bring me back.’ ‘I understand. I’m grateful, really. You’re the only hope I’ve got. Lisa Collier is just going through the motions.’ ‘OK. Tell you, the way it is, Vernon Langley and the prosecutor are going to nail you with that knife we found. Everything else is circumstantial, and I’m sure Lisa Collier will do her utmost to crush any testimony Eleanor and I provide for the prosecution. But that knife… I’m still not entirely convinced you didn’t do it. I saw you.’ Nicholas brightened. ‘I had one idea: a doppelganger, a tekmerc who underwent a total plastique reworking to look like me. If one of the others had seen him walking about in that guise they wouldn’t have thought anything of it. And I never used to say much, so they wouldn’t expect him to talk to them. Just blush and walk on, that’s what I normally did.’ ‘Yeah, plausible. Except Eleanor and I watched you go back to your room after you hid the knife and burnt the apron.’ ‘Oh.’ PETER F. HAMILTON 294 ‘I want to ask you some more questions. Do you want to get Lisa Collier to sit in?’ ‘No. I don’t think I can dig myself any deeper in, can I?’ ‘There is that. OK, first: did Kitchener ever mention an incident that happened a few years ago?’ ‘What incident?’ ‘That’s my problem. I remember seeing some news item about Launde maybe ten or so years back, but I can’t remember what it was.’ ‘No, nothing comes to mind. Kitchener always had so many complaints about the past, people he knew, politicians he’d argued with, the other professors back at Cambridge, that kind of thing. His entire life was one giant collection of incidents, really.’ ‘Yeah, I suppose it was. Well keep thinking about it; if anything does spring to mind get Lisa Collier to contact me at once. OK?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Right, now you’re sponsored by the Randon company, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes, they pay me an allowance, more like a salary actually, eight thousand New Sterling a year for the whole time I’m at Launde. Can you believe that much money? I sent two thousand back to Mum and Dad; they really struggled to help when I was at Cambridge, and I don’t spend much at the Abbey, you see. Then there’s a fund for any equipment I need for projects. Within reason, of course. But I never used any of that, most of my research was data simulations, the Abbey’s lightware cruncher was enough.’ ‘Did Randon ever ask you what Kitchener was working on?’ ‘No.’ ‘So they didn’t know about the wormhole research he was performing for Event Horizon?’ ‘No.’ ‘What about anyone else? You obviously knew about it.’ ‘Not very much, just that he was looking into it. Wormholes ~vould plug very neatly into his cosmos theory.’ A QUANTUM MURDER “What is that?’ ‘He called it the Godslayer.’ ‘The what?’ ‘Well, religion killer. Kitchener was hoping to put together a structural theory that went beyond Grand Unification. It would explain every phenomenon in the universe from psi to gravity. He said he could use it to prove that there was no such thing as God, that the universe was completely natural, and therefore explainable. Provided you had the maths to understand it.’ – Greg tried to imagine what Goldfinch, the Trinities’ fundamentalist preacher, would make of that, and failed. It would have been interesting to watch a meeting between the priest and the physicist, though – from a distance. ‘Kitchener genuinely didn’t care about other people’s sensibilities, did he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’ Nicholas said, a shade defensively. ‘You never met him, he was kind to me, really encouraging. But he hated religion. He said we’d all be better off without it, that it caused too much trouble, and too many wars. He said people called him the Newton of the age, but he’d rather be the Galileo.’ ‘And you didn’t mind all this talk?’ He observed the boy’s thought currents boil with surprise. ‘No. Why should I?’ ‘I take it that means you’re not religious.’ ‘Never really thought about it. Mum and Dad sometimes go to the Harvest Festival service, if they’re not too busy. And I can remember going to the Christmas carol service a couple of times when I was young. But that’s it.’ ‘What about the other students? Did any of them consider this Godslayer concept to be sacrilegio~is?’ ‘Nobody ever said anything, no.’ ‘OK. Was Kitchener working on any kind of energy genersting system; like microfusion, or proton boron fusion, something new, something radical?’ Nicholas screwed his face up. ‘Nothing like that. He gave me a magnetosphere induction problem to solve, though.’ “What’s that?’ PETER F. HAMILTON 296 ‘Well, it’s hardly new, but if you place a length of wire in orbit, its motion as it moves through the Earth’s magnetosphere will generate an electric current. It’s a simple induction principle, like a generator.’ ‘How big a current?’ ‘That depends on the size of the cable, obviously.’ ‘Yeah, right.’ Maybe the boy wasn’t so different after all. ‘What I need to know, Nicholas, is are you talking about something that can power an AV player, or a city?’ ‘Oh. A city, definitely, or maybe a medium-sized town. Kitchener was very insistent about that. He said that we had to learn to concentrate on the practical applications of physics, abstract theory was all very well but it doesn’t pay the bills. He was right, of course, he was always right. He called it his ninety-ten law. He let us study abstract theories for ninety per cent of the time, but we had to spend at least ten per cent of each week working on practical ideas. He used to set us two projects simultaneously, one of each.’ ‘How far bad you got with this magnetosphere project?’ ‘I hadn’t done much work on it at all, I was spending most of my time on the dark-mass project. But I did confirm its basic validity. I designed a cobweb array, about two hundred and fifty kilometres across. The beauty of that is, if you give it a slight spin it will retain its shape without any additional structural material, you only need the cables themselves. I was going to work on strength of materials limits next. But…’ ‘I thought beaming power down from space was ecologi- cally unsound.’ Nicholas smiled vacantly. ‘I was going to use a superconductor cable, tethered between the Equator and geostationary orbit. That’s a perfectly practical solution; the orbital tower is an idea even older than magnetosphere induction. It was originally suggested that you build it with magnetic rails and run lift capsules up and down, that way you’d never need any sort of spaceplane to get into orbit. My version was a lot simpler and cheaper, just a single strand fixed to a station that could receive power beamed to it from the induction A QUANTUM MURDER 297 webs, a bigger version of the communication platforms that are up there now. The superconductor would have to be held up by a monolattice filament, of course, it couldn’t possibly support its own weight. It was Kitchener who suggested it as an alternative method of bringing the power down. He joked about it, he said he’d be as rich as Julia Evans if it was ever built. He gets a royalty from monolattice filament, you see. It’s only a fraction of a per cent, but for a cable thirty-six thousand kilometres long, it would be a hell of a lot of money. He was really keen to see how the figures came out.’ ‘Nicholas, how advanced is this project? I mean, could it actually be built with today’s technology?’ ‘I don’t know. It was really just a thought experiment, Kitchener tailored them to match our fields of expertise. The equations were interesting, I had to juggle so many factors, but it did look like it would come out pretty expensive. That’s why I was excited about Event Horizon’s new spaceplane, the way it’s going to bring launch costs down. I was going to include those figures in my analysis.’ ‘But you never got round to it?’ ‘No.’ ‘Was the project stored in the Abbey’s Bendix?’ ‘Yes, but I kept a back-up file in my terminal. It should still be there.’ ‘Did you ever tell Randon that you were working on this idea?’ ‘Oh, no, I never discussed it with anybody else apart from the other students.’ ‘So the company never really showed much interest in what you were doing at Launde?’ ‘They offered me the sponsorship money and a guaranteed research position, that’s all. Kitchener’s students have this reputation, you see. It’s a bit snobby, but a lot of them have turned out to be real high-achievers.’ ‘Yeah.’ Greg couldn’t help thinking about Ranasfari. You couldn’t get any further apart than him and Kitchener, the cold aesthetic and the glorious old debauchee. The chemistry must have been there, though; Ranasfari clearly revered his PETER F. HAMILTON 298 mentor. And Kitchener had spotted the potential, just like he had with Nicholas. ‘It was all arranged through an agency in Cambridge,’ Nicholas said. ‘They specialize in placing graduates. I’ve never actually met anyone from the company itself. I was looking forward to working in France.’ ‘Do you speak French?’ ‘Not very well. I’ve got one of those teach yourself courses on an audio memox. I’ll speak it properly by the time… I mean, I would have spoken it properly by the time I finished my second year at Launde. There’s only a vocabulary and syntax to memorize, that’s not much of a problem for me.’ ‘Interesting. You have a lot of confidence in your memory, don’t you?’ ‘Yes, my recall is virtually perfect. I wasn’t trying to boast,’ he added contritely. ‘I didn’t say you were.’ ‘Kitchener said I should be proud of it. He said it was better than his.’ ‘Have you ever had days which you can’t remember? Events that are lost to you?’ Nicholas regarded him with a tinge of suspicion. ‘You mean like transient global amnesia?’ Greg was suddenly glad his thoughts weren’t available for Nicholas to read. But he really should have known better than trying to creep up on a topic with Nicholas, especially anything remotely connected with science. ‘Yeah, transient global amnesia, or even trauma erasure.’ ‘You think that’s why your psi faculty didn’t spot any guilt, isn’t it? That I did murder Kitchener, and I just blanked it out.’ ‘It’s a possibility, Nicholas, and you know it is.’ The swift heat of belligerence faded from the boy. ‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘But I don’t have blackouts. And I’ve never forgotten a day or an hour in my life.’ ‘OK.’ ‘I was telling the truth then, wasn’t I?’ ‘Yes, Nicholas. You’ve never suffered from memory loss.’ A QUANTUM MURDER 299 He rose to his feet, still as undecided as when he’d walked in. ‘I’ll let you know what happens.’ ‘Mr Mandel. Thanks.’ ‘You’re not out of it yet.’

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