‘Walk closer, Mr. Bradley,’ the technician advised. ‘He’s very deaf out of water.’
‘Do you recognize me?’
‘Yes. You are John Maxwell.’
‘Back to the drawing board,’ muttered Zwicker.
‘And who,’ asked Bradley, more amused than annoyed, ‘is John Maxwell?’
The girl was quite embarrassed.
‘He’s section chief, Voice Recognition. But there’s no problem — this isn’t a fair test. Underwater he’ll know you from half a kilometer away.’
‘I hope so. Goodbye, J.J. See you later — when you’re not quite so deaf. Let’s see if Deep Jeep is in better shape.’
Deep Jeep was the lab’s other main project, in some ways almost equally demanding. The reaction of most visitors at first viewing was: ‘Is it a submarine or a diving suit?’ And the answer was always, ‘Both.’
Servicing and operating three-man deep submersibles like Marvin was an expensive business: a single dive could cost a hundred thousand dollars. But there were many occasions when a much less elaborate, one-man vehicle would be adequate.
Jason Bradley’s secret ambition was already well known to the entire lab. He hoped Deep Jeep would be ready in time to take him down to Titanic — while the wreck still lay on the ocean floor.
34 STORM
It would be decades before the meteorologists could prove that the great storm of 2010 was one of the series that had begun in the 1980s, heralding the climatic changes of the next millennium. Before it exhausted its energies battering against the western ramparts of the Alps, Gloria did twenty billion dollars’ worth of damage and took more than a thousand lives.
The weather satellites, of course, gave a few hours’ warning — otherwise the death toll would have been even greater. But, inevitably, there were many who did not hear the forecasts, or failed to take them seriously. Especially in Ireland, which was the first to receive the hammerblow from the heavens.
Donald and Edith Craig were editing the latest footage from Operation DEEP FREEZE when Gloria hit Conroy Castle. They heard and felt nothing deep inside the massive walls — not even the crash when the camera obscura was swept off the battlements.
Ada now cheerfully admitted that she was hopeless at pure mathematics — the kind which, in G. H. Hardy’s famous toast, would never be of any use to anyone. Unknown to him — because the secrets of ENIGMA’s code-breaking were not revealed until decades later — Hardy had been proved spectacularly wrong during his own lifetime. In the hands of Alan Turing and his colleagues, even something as abstract as number theory could win a war.
Most of calculus and higher trigonometry, and virtually all of symbolic logic, were closed books to Ada. She simply wasn’t interested; her heart was in geometry and the properties of space. Already she was trifling with five dimensions, four having proved too simple. Like Newton, much of the time she was ‘sailing strange seas of thought — alone.’
But today, she was back in ordinary three-space, thanks to the present that ‘Uncle’ Bradley had just sent her. Thirty years after its first appearance, Rubik’s Cube had made a comeback — in a far more deadly mutation.
Because it was a purely mechanical device, the original cube had one weakness, for which its addicts were sincerely thankful. Unlike all their neighbors, the six center squares on each face were fixed. The other forty-eight squares could orbit around them, to create a possible 43252 00327 44898 56000 distinct patterns.
The Mark II had no such limitations; all the fifty-four squares were capable of movement, so there were no fixed centers to give reference points to its maddened manipulators. Only the development of microchips and liquid crystal displays had made such a prodigy possible; nothing really moved, but the multicolored squares could be dragged around the face of the cube merely by touching them with a fingertip.
Relaxing in her little boat with Lady, engrossed with her new toy, Ada had been slow to notice the darkening sky. The storm was almost upon her before she started the electric motor and headed for shelter. That there could be any danger never occurred to her; after all, Lake Mandelbrot was only three feet deep. But she disliked getting wet — and Lady hated it.
By the time she had reached the lake’s first western lobe, the roar of the gale was almost deafening. Ada was thrilled; this was really exciting! But Lady was terrified, and tried to hide herself under the seat.
Heading down the Spike, between the avenue of cypresses, she was partly sheltered from the full fury of the gale. But for the first time, she became alarmed; the great trees on either side were swaying back and forth like reeds.
She was only a dozen meters from the safety of the boathouse, far into the Utter West of the M-Set and nearing the infinity border post at minus 1.999, when Patrick O’Brian’s fears about the transplanted cypress trees were tragically fulfilled.
35 ARTIFACT
One of the most moving archaeological discoveries ever made took place in Israel in 1976, during a series of excavations carried out by scientists from the Hebrew University and the French Center for Prehistoric Research in Jerusalem.
At a 10,000-year-old campsite, they uncovered the skeleton of a child, one hand pressed against its cheek. In that hand is another tiny skeleton: that of a puppy about five months old.
This is the earliest example we know of man and dog sharing the same grave. There must be many, many later ones.
(From Friends of Man by Roger Caras: Simon & Schuster, 2001.)
‘You may be interested to know,’ said Dr. Jafferjee with that clinical detachment which Donald found annoying (though how else could psychiatrists stay sane?) ‘that Edith’s case isn’t unique. Ever since the M-Set was discovered in 1980, people have managed to become obsessed with it. Usually they are computer hackers, whose grip on reality is often rather tenuous. There are no less than sixty-three examples of Mandelmania now in the data banks.’
‘And is there any cure?’
Dr. Jafferjee frowned. ‘Cure’ was a word he seldom used. ‘Adjustment’ was the term he preferred.
‘Let’s say that in eighty percent of the cases, the subject has been able to resume an — ah — normal life, sometimes with the help of medication or electronic implants. Quite an encouraging figure.’
Except, thought Donald, for the twenty percent. Which category does Edith belong to?
For the first week after the tragedy, she had been unnaturally calm; after the funeral, some of their mutual friends had been shocked by her apparent lack of emotion. But Donald knew how badly she had been wounded, and was not surprised when she began to behave irrationally. When she started to wander around the castle at night, searching through the empty rooms and dank passageways that had never been renovated, he realized that it was time to get medical advice.
Nevertheless, he kept putting it off, hoping that Edith would make the normal recovery from the first stages of grief. Indeed, this seemed to be happening. Then Patrick O’Brian died.
Edith’s relationship with the old gardener had always been a prickly one, but they had respected each other and shared a mutual love for Ada. The child’s death had been as devastating a blow to Pat as to her parents; he also blamed himself for the tragedy. If only he had refused to transplant those cypresses — if only . . .
Pat began drinking heavily again, and was now seldom sober. One cold night, after the landlord of the Black Swan had gently ejected him, he managed to lose his way in the village where he had spent his entire life, and was found frozen to death in the morning. Father McMullen considered that the verdict should have been suicide rather than misadventure; but if it was a sin to give Pat a Christian burial, he would argue that out with God in due course. As, also, the matter of the tiny bundle that Ada held cradled in her arms.
The day after the second funeral, Donald had found Edith sitting in front of a high-resolution monitor, studying one of the infinite miniature versions of the set. She would not speak to him, and presently he realized, to his horror, that she was searching for Ada.
In later years, Donald Craig would often wonder about the relationship that had developed between himself and Jason Bradley. Though they had met only half a dozen times, and then almost always on business, he had felt that bond of mutual sympathy that sometimes grows between two men, and can be almost as strong as a sexual one, even when it has absolutely no erotic content.
Perhaps Donald reminded Bradley of his lost partner Ted Collier, of whom he often spoke. In any event, they enjoyed each other’s company, and met even when it was not strictly necessary. Though Kato and the Nippon-Turner syndicate might well have been suspicious, Bradley never compromised his ISA neutrality. Still less did Craig try to exploit it; they might exchange personal secrets, but not professional confidences. Donald never learned what role, if any, Bradley had played in the authority’s decision to ban hydrazine.