Solar

  Reflecting on the night before, he found it extraordinary that after a lifetime of infidelities, a night with an imaginary friend was no less exciting. For the first time in weeks he felt faintly cheerful, even whistled a show tune as he microwaved his supper, and when he saw himself in the gold-leaf sunking mirror in the cloakroom downstairs, thought his face had lost some fat and looked purposeful, with a shadow of cheekbone visible, and was, by the light of the thirty-watt bulb, somewhat noble, a possible effect of the sugary cholesterol-lowering yoghurt drink he was forcing himself to swallow each morning. When he went to bed he kept the radio off and lay waiting with the light turned low for the remorseful little tap of her fingernails on his door.

  It did not come, but he was not troubled. Let her pass a white night re-examining her life and what was meaningful, let her weigh in the scales of human worth a horny-handed Tarpin and his shrouded boat against ethereal Beard of planetary renown. The following five nights she stayed home, as far as he could tell, while he was committed to his lecture and other meetings and dinners, and when he came in, usually after midnight, he hoped his confident footfalls gave the impression to the darkened house of a man returning from a tryst.

  On the sixth night, he was free to stay in, and she chose to go out, having spent longer than usual under shower and hairdryer. From his place, a small, deeply recessed window on a first-floor half-landing, he watched her go along the garden path and pause by a tall drift of vermilion hollyhocks, pause as though reluctant to leave, and put her hand out to examine a flower. She picked it, squeezing it between newly painted nails of thumb and forefinger, held it a moment to consider, then let it drop to her feet. The summer dress, beige silk, armless, with a single pleat in the small of her back, was new, a signal he was uncertain how to read. She continued to the front gate and he thought there was heaviness in her step, or at least some slackening of her customary eagerness, and she parted from the kerb in the Peugeot at near-normal acceleration.

  But he was less happy that night waiting in, confused again about his judgement, beginning to think he was right after all, his radio prank had sunk him. To help think matters through he poured a scotch and watched football. In place of dinner he ate a litre tub of strawberry ice cream and prised apart a half-kilo of pistachios. He was restless, bothered by unfocused sexual need, and coming to the conclusion that he might as well be having or resuming a real affair. He passed some time turning the pages of his address book, stared at the phone a good while, but did not pick it up.

  He drank half the bottle and before eleven fell asleep fully dressed on the bed with the overhead light on, and for several seconds did not know where he was when, some hours later, he was woken by the sound of a voice downstairs. The bedside clock showed two thirty. It was Patrice talking to Tarpin, and Beard, still fortified by drink, was in the mood to have a word. He stood groggily in the centre of the bedroom, swaying a little as he tucked in his shirt. Quietly, he opened his door. All the house lights were on, and that was fine, he was already going down the stairs with no thought for the consequences. Patrice was still talking, and as he crossed the hall towards the open sitting-room door he thought that he heard her laughing or singing and that he was about to break up a little celebration.

  But she was alone and crying, sitting hunched forward on the sofa with her shoes lying on their sides on the long glass coffee table. It was an unfamiliar bottled, keening sound. If she had ever cried like this for him, it had been in his absence. He paused in the doorway and she did not see him at first. She was a sad sight. A handkerchief or tissue was twisted in her hand, her delicate shoulders were bowed and shaking, and Beard was filled with pity. He sensed that a reconciliation was at hand and that all she needed was a gentle touch, kind words, no questions, and she would fold into him and he would take her upstairs, though even in his sudden warmth of feeling, he knew he could not carry her, not even in both arms.

  As he began to cross the room a floorboard creaked and she looked up. Their eyes met, but only for a second because her hands flew up to her face and covered it as she twisted away. He said her name, and she shook her head. Awkwardly, with her back to him, she got up from the sofa and, walking almost sideways, she stumbled on the polar-bear skin that tended to slide too easily on the polished wooden floor. He had come close to breaking an ankle once and had despised the rug ever since. He also disliked its leering, wide-open mouth and bared teeth yellowed by exposure to the light. They had never done anything to secure it to the floor, and there was no question of throwing it out because it was a wedding present from her father. She steadied herself, remembered to pick up her shoes and, with a free hand covering her eyes, hurried past him, flinching as he reached out to touch her arm, and beginning to cry again, more freely this time, as she ran up the stairs.

  He turned off the lights in the room and lay on the sofa. Pointless to go after her when she did not want him, and it did not matter now, because he had seen. Too late for her hand to conceal the bruise below her right eye that spread across the top of her cheek, black fading to inflamed red at its edges, swelling under her lower lid, forcing the eye shut. He sighed aloud in resignation. It was inevitable, his duty was clear, he would have to get in his car now and drive to Cricklewood, lean on the doorbell until he had brought Tarpin from his bed, and have it out with him, right there beneath the coach lamp, and surprise his loathed opponent with an astonishing turn of speed and purpose. With eyes narrowing, he thought it through again, lingering on the detail of his right fist bursting through the cartilage of Tarpin’s nose, and then, with minor revisions, he reconsidered the scene through closed eyes, and did not stir until the following morning when he was woken by the sound of the front door closing as she left for work.

  He held an honorary university post in Geneva and did no teaching there, lent his name, his title, Professor Beard, Nobel laureate, to letterheads, to institutes, signed up to international ‘initiatives’, sat on a Royal Commission on science funding, spoke on the radio in layman’s terms about Einstein or photons or quantum mechanics, helped out with grant applications, was a consultant editor on three scholarly journals, wrote peer reviews and references, took an interest in the gossip, the politics of science, the positioning, the special pleading, the terrifying nationalism, the tweaking of colossal sums out of ignorant ministers and bureaucrats for one more particle accelerator or rented instrument space on a new satellite, appeared at giant conventions in the US – eleven thousand physicists in one place! – listened to post-docs explain their research, gave with minimal variation the same series of lectures on the calculations underpinning the Beard–Einstein Conflation that had brought him his prize, awarded prizes and medals himself, accepted honorary degrees, and gave after-dinner speeches and eulogies for retiring or about-to-be-cremated colleagues. In an inward, specialised world he was, courtesy of Stockholm, a celebrity, and he coasted from year to year, vaguely weary of himself, bereft of alternatives. All the excitement and unpredictability was in the private life. Perhaps that was enough, perhaps he had achieved all he could during one brilliant summer in his youth. One thing was certain: two decades had passed since he last sat down in silence and solitude for hours on end, pencil and pad in hand, to do some thinking, to have an original hypothesis, play with it, pursue it, tease it into life. The occasion never arose – no, that was a weak excuse. He lacked the will, the material, he lacked the spark. He had no new ideas.

  But there was a new government research establishment on the outskirts of Reading, hard against the roar of the motorway’s eastbound section and downwind of a beer factory. The Centre was supposed to resemble the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, near Denver, sharing its aims, but not its acreage or funding. Michael Beard was the new Centre’s first head, though a senior civil servant called Jock Braby did the real work. The administrative buildings, some of whose dividing walls contained asbestos, were not new, and nor were the laboratories, whose purpose had once been to test noxious
materials for the building trade. All that was new was a three-metre-high barbed-wire and concrete post fence, with regularly spaced keep-out signs, thrown up around the perimeter of the National Centre for Renewable Energy without Beard’s or Braby’s consent. It represented, they soon found out, seventeen per cent of the first year’s budget. A sodden, twenty-acre field had been bought from a local farmer, and work to begin on drainage was in the planning stage.

  Beard was not wholly sceptical about climate change. It was one in a list of issues, of looming sorrows, that comprised the background to the news, and he read about it, vaguely deplored it and expected governments to meet and take action. And of course he knew that a molecule of carbon dioxide absorbed energy in the infrared range, and that humankind was putting these molecules into the atmosphere in significant quantities. But he himself had other things to think about. And he was unimpressed by some of the wild commentary that suggested the world was in ‘peril’, that humankind was drifting towards calamity, when coastal cities would disappear under the waves, crops fail, and hundreds of millions of refugees surge from one country, one continent, to another, driven by drought, floods, famine, tempests, unceasing wars for diminishing resources. There was an Old Testament ring to the forewarnings, an air of plague-of-boils and deluge-of-frogs, that suggested a deep and constant inclination, enacted over the centuries, to believe that one was always living at the end of days, that one’s own demise was urgently bound up with the end of the world, and therefore made more sense, or was just a little less irrelevant. The end of the world was never pitched in the present, where it could be seen for the fantasy it was, but just around the corner, and when it did not happen, a new issue, a new date would soon emerge. The old world purified by incendiary violence, washed clean by the blood of the unsaved, that was how it had been for Christian millennial sects – death to the unbelievers! And for Soviet Communists – death to the kulaks! And for Nazis and their thousand-year fantasy – death to the Jews! And then the truly democratic contemporary equivalent, an all-out nuclear war – death to everyone! When that did not happen, and after the Soviet empire had been devoured by its internal contradictions, and in the absence of any other overwhelming concern beyond boring, intransigent global poverty, the apocalyptic tendency had conjured yet another beast.

  But Beard was always on the lookout for an official role with a stipend attached. A couple of long-running sinecures had recently come to an end, and his university salary, lecture fees and media appearances were never quite sufficient. Fortunately, by the end of the century, the Blair government wished to be, or appear to be, practically rather than merely rhetorically engaged with climate change and announced a number of initiatives, one of which was the Centre, a facility for basic research in need of a mortal at its head sprinkled with Stockholm’s magic dust. At the political level, a new minister had been appointed, an ambitious Mancunian with a populist’s touch, proud of his city’s industrial past, who told a press conference that he would ‘tap the genius’ of the British people by inviting them to submit their own clean-energy ideas and drawings. In front of the cameras he promised that every submission would be answered. Braby’s team – half a dozen underpaid post-doctoral physicists housed in four temporary cabins in a sea of mud – received hundreds of proposals within six weeks. Most were from lonely types working out of garden sheds, a few from start-up companies with zippy logos and ‘patents pending’.

  In the winter of 1999, on his weekly visits to the site, Beard would glance through the piles sorted on a makeshift table. In this avalanche of dreams were certain clear motifs. Some proposals used water as a fuel for cars, and recycled the emission – water vapour – back into the engine; some were versions of the electric motor or generator whose output exceeded the input and seemed to work from vacuum energy – the energy supposedly found in empty space – or from what Beard thought must be violations of Lenz’s Law. All were variants on the perpetual-motion machine. These self-taught inventors seemed to have no awareness of the long history of their devices, or how they would, if they actually worked, destroy the entire basis of modern physics. The nation’s inventors were up against the first and second laws of thermodynamics, a wall of solid lead. One of the post-docs proposed sorting the ideas according to which of the laws they violated, first, second or both.

  There was another common theme. Some envelopes contained no drawings, only a letter, sometimes half a page, sometimes ten. The author regretfully explained that he – it was always a he – declined to enclose detailed plans because it was well known that government agencies had much to fear from the kind of free energy that his machine would deliver, for it would close off an important tax resource. Or the armed forces would seize on the idea, declare it top secret, then develop it for their own use. Or conventional energy providers would send round thugs to beat the inventor to a pulp in order to maintain business supremacy. Or someone would steal the idea for himself and make his fortune. There were notorious instances of all these, the writer might add. The drawings could therefore only be seen at a certain address by an unaccompanied person from the Centre, and only with the involvement of intermediaries.

  The table in ‘Hut Two’ consisted of five builder’s planks set on trestles, supporting sixteen hundred letters and printed emails, sorted by date. To save the Minister’s face, all would need an answer. Braby, a stooping, large-jawed fellow, was furious at the waste of time. Furious, but compliant. Beard was for forwarding them all to the Minister’s department in London, along with a few model replies. But Braby thought he was in line for a knighthood and Mrs Braby was keen, and upsetting a minister known to be close to Number Ten could blow the gong away. So the post-docs were set to work, and the Centre’s first project – designing a wind generator for city roofs – was delayed by months.

  All the more time for Beard, not yet a refugee from the near-silent endgame of his fifth marriage, to study the ‘geniuses’, so named by the post-docs. He was drawn by the whiff of obsession, paranoia, insomnia and, above all, pathos that rose from the piles. Was he finding, he wondered, a version of himself in certain of these letters, of a parallel Michael Beard who, through drink, sex, drugs or plain misfortune, might have missed out on the disciplines of a formal education in physics and maths? Missed out, and still craved to think, tinker, contribute. Some of these men were truly clever but were required by their extravagant ambitions to reinvent the wheel, and then, one hundred and twenty years after Nikola Tesla, the induction motor, and then read inexpertly and far too hopefully into quantum field theory to find their esoteric fuel right under their noses, in the voids of the empty air of their sheds or spare bedrooms – zero-point energy.

  Quantum mechanics. What a repository, a dump, of human aspiration it was, the borderland where mathematical rigour defeated common sense, and reason and fantasy irrationally merged. Here, the mystically inclined could find whatever they required, and claim science as their proof. And for these ingenious men in their spare time, what ghostly and beautiful music it must be – spectral asymmetry, resonances, entanglement, quantum harmonic oscillators – beguiling ancient airs, the harmony of the spheres that might transmute a lead wall into gold, and bring into being the engine that ran on virtually nothing, on virtual particles, that emitted no harm and would power the human enterprise as well as save it. Beard was stirred by the yearnings of these lonely men. And why should he think they were lonely? It was not, or not only, condescension that made him think them so. They did not know enough, but they knew too much to have anyone to talk to. What mate waiting down the pub or in the British Legion, what hard-pressed wife with job and kids and housework, was going to follow them down these warped funnels in the space–time continuum, into the wormhole, the shortcut to a single, final answer to the global problem of energy?

  Beard devised a rubric inspired by the US Patent Office which advised the geniuses that all plans for perpetual motion and ‘above unity’ machines should be accompanied by a working model. But
none ever was. Mindful of his ambitions, Braby watched over the post-docs closely as they worked through the piles. Every submission had to be answered individually, seriously, politely. But on the planks there was nothing new, or nothing new that was useful. The revolutionary lone inventor was a fantasy of popular culture – and the Minister.

  With numbing slowness the Centre began to take shape. Duckboards were laid over the mud – a huge advance – then the mud was smoothed and seeded, and by summer there were lawns with paths across them, and in time the place resembled every other boring institute in the world. The labs were refitted, and at last the temporary cabins were hauled away. The adjacent field was drained, and foundations were dug, and building began. More staff were taken on – janitors, office cleaners, administrators, repair men, even scientists, and a human-resources team to find such people. When a critical mass was reached, a canteen was opened. And housed in a smart brick lodge next to red-and-white striped barrier gates were a dozen security guards in dark blue uniforms, who were cheery with one another, stern with almost everyone else and who seemed to believe that the place essentially belonged to them, and all the rest were interlopers.

  In all this time, not one of the six post-docs moved on to a better-paid job at Caltech or MIT. In a field crammed with prodigies of all sorts, their CVs were exceptional. For a long while Beard, who had always had face-recognition problems, especially with men, could not, or chose not to, tell them apart. They ranged in age from twenty-six to twenty-eight and all stood above six feet. Two had ponytails, four had identical rimless glasses, two were called Mike, two had Scots accents, three wore coloured string around their wrists, all wore faded jeans and trainers and tracksuit tops. Far better to treat them all the same, somewhat distantly, or as if they were one person. Best not to insult one Mike by resuming a conversation that might have been with the other, or to assume that the fellow with the ponytail and glasses, Scots accent and no wrist string was unique, or was not called Mike. Even Jock Braby referred to all six as ‘the ponytails’.