Danchekker waited, growing visibly more irritable as the seconds dragged by. “Chemical processes cannot distinguish a radioisotope,” he finally repeated. “Therefore no enzyme could be produced in the way you say it was. And even if it could, there would be no purpose to be served. Chemically the enzyme will behave the same whether it has radioisotopes in it or not. What you’re saying is preposterous!”
Hunt sighed and pointed a weary finger toward the screen.
“I’m not saying it, Chris,” he reminded the professor. “The numbers are. There are the facts-check ’em.” Hunt leaned forward and cocked his head to one side, at the same time contorting his features into a frown as if he had just been struck with a sudden thought. “What were you saying a minute ago about people wanting to fit the evidence to suit the answers they’d already made their minds up about?” he asked.
chapter two
At the age of eleven, Victor Hunt had moved from the bedlam of his family home in the East End of London and gone to live with an uncle and aunt in Worcester. His uncle-the odd man out in the Hunt family-was a design engineer at the nearby laboratories of a leading computer manufacturer and it was his patient guidance that first opened the boy’s eyes to the excitement and mystery of the world of electronics.
Some time later young Victor put his newfound fascination with the laws of formal logic and the techniques of logic-circuit design to its first practical test. He designed and built a hard-wired special-purpose processor which, when given any date after the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1582, would output a number from 1 to 7 denoting the day of the week on which it had fallen. When, breathless with expectation, he switched it on for the first time, the system remained dead. It turned out that he had connected an electrolytic capacitor the wrong way around and shorted out the power supply.
This exercise taught him two things: Most problems have simpie solutions once somebody looks at things the right way, and the exhilaration of winning in the end makes all the effort worthwhile. It also served to reinforce his intuitive understanding that the only sure way to prove or disprove what looked like a good idea was to find some way to test it. As his subsequent career led him from electronics to mathematical physics and thence to flucleonics, these fundamentals became the foundations of his permanent mental makeup. In nearly thirty years he had never lost his addiction to the final minutes of mounting suspense that came when the crucial experiment had been prepared and the moment of truth was approaching.
He experienced that same feeling now, as he watched Vincent Carizan make a few last-minute adjustments to the power-amplifier settings. The attraction in the main electronics lab at Pithead Base that morning was an item of equipment recovered from the Gany
mean ship. It was roughly cylindrical, about the size of an oil drum, and appeared to be rather simple in function in that it possessed few input and output connections; apparently it was a self-contained device of some sort, rather than a component in some larger and more complex system.
However, its function was far from obvious. The engineers at Pithead had concluded that the connections were intended as power inlet points. From an analysis of the insulating materials used, the voltage clamping and protection circuits, the smoothing circuits, and the filtering arrangements, they had deduced the kind of electrical supply it was designed to work from. This had enabled them to set up a suitable arrangement of transformers and frequency converters. Today was the day they intended to switch it on to see what happened.
Besides Hunt and Carizan, two other engineers were present in the laboratory to supervise the measuring instruments that had been assembled for the experiment. Frank Towers observed Canzan’s nod of satisfaction as he stepped back from the amplifier panel and asked:
“All set for overload check?”
“Yep,” Carizan answered. “Give it a zap.” Towers threw a switch on another panel. A sharp clunk sounded instantly as a circuit breaker dropped out somewhere in the equipment cabinet behind the panel.