Solar

  And none of these young men appeared as much in awe of Michael Beard, Nobel laureate, as he thought they should. Clearly, they knew of his work, but in meetings they referred to it in passing, parenthetically, in a dismissive mumble, as though it had long been superseded, when in fact the opposite was true, the Beard–Einstein Conflation was in all the textbooks, unassailable, experimentally robust. As undergraduates the ponytails would surely have witnessed a demonstration of the ‘Feynman Plaid’, illustrating the topographical essence of Beard’s work. But at informal gatherings in the canteen these giant children became frontiersmen of theoretical physics and spoke round the Conflation, treated it as one might a dusty formulation by Sir Humphry Davy, and made elliptical references to BLG or some overwrought arcana in M-theory or Nambu Lie 3-algebra as if it were not a change of subject. And that was the problem. Much of the time he did not know what they were saying. The ponytails spoke at speed, on a constant, rising interrogative note, which caused an obscure muscle to tighten in the back of Beard’s throat as he listened. They failed to enunciate their words, going only so far with a thought, until one of the others muttered, ‘Right!’, after which they would jump to the next unit of utterance – one could hardly call it a sentence.

  But it was worse than that. Some of the physics which they took for granted was unfamiliar to him. When he looked it up at home, he was irritated by the length and complexity of the calculations. He liked to think he was an old hand and knew his way around string theory and its major variants. But these days there were simply too many add-ons and modifications. When Beard was a twelve-year-old schoolboy, his maths teacher had told the class that whenever they found an exam question coming out at eleven nineteenths or thirteen twenty-sevenths, they should know they had the wrong answer. Too messy to be true. Frowning for two hours at a stretch, so that the following morning parallel pink lines were still visible across his forehead, he read up on the latest, on Bagger, Lambert and Gustavsson – of course! BLG was not a sandwich – and their Lagrangian description of coincident M2-branes. God may or may not have played dice, but surely He was nowhere near this clever, or such a show-off. The material world simply could not be so complicated.

  But the domestic world could. In Beard’s tally of sheared wedlock, none was so foolishly prolonged – by him – and none so reduced him or engendered such ridiculous daydreams and weight-gain and unwitnessed folly as this, his fifth and last. During those long months there was never a time when he thought he was fully himself, and besides, he soon forgot that self and settled into a state of mild and extended psychosis. He was hearing voices after all, and seeing elements in the situation – Patrice’s sudden, lambent beauty, for example – which he decided later did not exist. The somatic consequences had a textbook quality. A sequence of minor ailments mocked the immune system that was supposed to protect him. Pathogens swam in hordes across the moat of his defences, they swarmed over the castle walls armed with cold sores, mouth ulcers, fatigue, joint pain, watery bowels, nose acne, blepharitis – a new one this, a disfiguring inflammation of the eyelids that erupted into white-peaked Mount Fuji styes that pressured his eyeballs, blurring his vision. Insomnia and monomania also distorted his view, and on the edge of sleep, when it came at last, he heard a newsreader’s voice reminding him of his sorry state, but not in words he could actually hear. Beyond this, he suffered the rational despair of a cuckold whose wife, despite her fading black eye, still moved about the house with a triumphal air, falsely cheerful, drifting away the moment he attempted a serious conversation. The mouth is famously over-represented in the brain, and he felt a tiny sore along a crack in the centre of his lower lip as a hideous cicatrice, the mark of his fate. How could she ever kiss him again? She would not be engaged or challenged or accused, she would not be loved, not by him.

  Yes, yes, he had been a lying womaniser, he had it coming, but now that it had arrived, what was he supposed to do, beyond taking his punishment? To which god was he to offer his apologies? He had had enough. After morosely clinging to stupid hopes, he began to watch the post and emails for the invitation that would take him far away from Belsize Park and shake some independent life into his sorry frame. About half a dozen a week arrived throughout the year, but so far nothing had interested him among the inducements to give lectures on the shore of a plutocratic north-Italian lake, or in an unexciting German schloss, and he felt too weak and raw to discuss the Conflation before one more colleague-crowded conference in New Delhi or Los Angeles. He had no idea what he wanted, but he thought he would know it when he saw it.

  Meanwhile, it was soothing, mostly, to take once a week the grubby morning train from Paddington to Reading, to be met at that Victorian station squashed in among the stubby tower blocks and be driven a few miles in a prototype Prius to the Centre by one of the indistinguishable ponytails. Leaving home, Beard was a tensed one-note vibrating string, whose oscillations diminished the further he left his home behind and the closer he approached the expensive perimeter fence. The vibrations came to rest as he acknowledged with raised forefinger the friendly salute of the security guards – how they loved a supremo! – and swept by, under the raised red-and-white barrier. Braby generally came out to meet him and even, with barely a touch of mandarin irony, held open the car door, for this was no cuckold arriving, but the distinguished visitor, the Chief, counted on to speak up for the place in the press, encourage the energy industries to take an interest, and squeeze another quarter-million from the blustering Minister.

  The two men took coffee together at the start of the day. Progress and delays were listed and Beard noted whatever was required of him, then toured the site. In an off-the-cuff way he had proposed right at the start that it would be easier to procure more funds if he could claim for the Centre a single eye-catching project that would be comprehensible to the taxpayer and the media. And so the WUDU had been launched, a Wind turbine for Urban Domestic Use, a gizmo the householder could install on his rooftop to generate enough power to make a significant reduction in his electricity bill. On town roofs the wind did not blow smoothly from one direction the way it did on high towers in open country, so the physicists and engineers were asked to research an optimal design for wind-turbine blades in turbulent conditions. Beard had leaned on an old friend at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough for access to a wind tunnel, but first there were some intricate maths and aerodynamics to investigate, some sub-branch of chaos theory that he himself had little patience with. His interest in technology was even weaker than his interest in climate science. He had thought it would be a matter of settling the maths for the design, building three or four prototypes and testing them in the tunnel. But more people had to be hired as related issues wormed their way onto the agenda: vibration, noise, cost, height, wind shear, gyroscopic precession, cyclic stress, roof strength, materials, gearing, efficiency, phasing with the grid, planning permissions. What had seemed a simple wheeze had turned into a monster that was eating up all the attention and resources of the half-built Centre. And it was too late to turn back.

  Beard preferred to go around alone to witness guiltily the consequences of his casual proposal. By the early summer of 2000 the post-docs each had a small cubicle of their own. Breaking up the group had helped, as had the nameplates on the door, but Beard put it down mostly to his own perceptiveness, the way each of the young men, after seven or eight months, was drifting into focus. He had made a mere half-dozen trips from Reading station in the Prius when, looking up from a speech he was to give that night in Oxford, he realised that, of course, the same driver had picked him up each time. He was one of the two who actually had a ponytail, a tall, thin-faced lad with a mouth overstuffed with large teeth and goofy smile. He came from outside Swaffham in Norfolk, Beard learned in this, his first focused conversation, and had been at Imperial, then Cambridge, then two years at Caltech in Pasadena, and none of these fabled places had diluted the pure inflections of his rural accent and its innocent swerves and dips
and persistent rising line, suggestive to Beard of hedgerows and hayricks. His name was Tom Aldous. He told the Chief in that first chat that he had applied to work at the Centre because he thought the planet was in danger, and that his background in particle physics might be of some use, and that when he saw that Beard himself was going to lead the team, Beard of the Beard–Einstein Conflation, he, Tom Aldous, excitedly assumed that the Centre would have as its prime concern solar energy, particularly artificial photosynthesis and what he called nano-solar, about which he was convinced . . .

  ‘Solar energy?’ Beard said mildly. He knew perfectly well what was meant, but still, the term had a dubious halo of meaning, an invocation of New Age Druids in robes dancing round Stonehenge at Midsummer’s dusk. He also distrusted anyone who routinely referred to ‘the planet’ as proof of thinking big.

  ‘Yes!’ Aldous smiled with his many teeth into the rear-view mirror. It would not have occurred to him that the Chief was not an expert in the field. ‘It’s all out there, waiting for us to understand how to use it, and when we do, we’ll be amazed we ever thought of burning coal and oil and the like.’

  Beard was intrigued by the way Aldous said ‘loike’. It seemed to mock what he was trying to say. They were going along a four-lane ring road with flowering hawthorns in the central reservation uselessly casting their scent at the passing traffic. The previous night, with no expectation of sleep, he had lain on his bed in his dressing gown reading while she stayed out all night. It was an unpublished bundle of letters to various colleagues from Paul Dirac, a man entirely claimed by science, bereft of small talk and other human skills. At six forty-five, Beard had set down the typescript and had gone to the bathroom to shave. Sunlight was already sloping through the front-garden birch and patterning the marble floor beneath his toes. What a waste, a failure of good governance, to have the sun so high so early in the day. He could not bear to count, he thought as he took his razor to the new sprouting hair between his eyebrows to give himself a younger look, all the hours of daylight he had ever missed in summer. But what could he have done, what was there for any young man at seven in the morning at any time of year, beyond sleep or getting to work? Now his sleep deficit stretched back weeks.

  ‘Do you think we could ever get by,’ he asked, stifling a yawn, ‘without coal and oil and gas?’

  Aldous was taking them at a clip around a giant roundabout as big and busy as a racing circuit, that slung them centrifugally out upon a descending slip road and down onto the motorway, into the redoubled roar of onrushing vehicles, and trucks the size of five terraced houses whining in file towards Bristol at eighty-five miles per hour, and everyone else lining up to shoot past. Exactly so – how long could this go on? Beard, weak and tender from sleeplessness, felt belittled. The M4 demonstrated a passion for existence which he could no longer match. He was for the B-road, a cart track, a footpath. Shrinking inside his Harris tweed jacket, he listened to Tom Aldous, who spoke with the lilting confidence of a prize pupil providing the answers he thinks he knows his teacher wants.

  ‘Coal and then oil have made us, but now we know, burning the stuff will ruin us. We need a different fuel or we fail, we sink. It’s about another industrial revolution. And there’s no way round it, the future is electricity and hydrogen, the only two energy carriers we know that are clean at the point of use.’

  ‘So, more nuclear power.’

  The boy took his eyes off the road to lock with Beard’s in the mirror – but for too long, and the older man, tensing on the back seat, looked away to encourage the driver’s gaze back on the mayhem outside.

  ‘Dirty, dangerous, expensive. But you know, we’ve already got a nuclear power station up and running with a great safety record making clean energy converting hydrogen to helium at no cost, nicely situated ninety-three million miles away. You know what I always think, Professor Beard? If an alien arrived on earth and saw all this sunlight, he’d be amazed to hear that we think we’ve got an energy problem. Photovoltaics! I read Einstein on it, I read you. The Conflation is brilliant. And God’s greatest gift to us is surely this, that a photon striking a semiconductor releases an electron. The laws of physics are so benign, so generous. And get this. There’s a guy in a forest in the rain and he’s dying of thirst. He has an axe and he starts cutting down the trees to drink the sap. A mouthful in each tree. All around him is a wasteland, no wildlife, and he knows that thanks to him the forest is disappearing fast. So why doesn’t he just open his mouth and drink the rain? Because he’s brilliant at chopping down trees, he’s always done things this way, and he thinks that people who advocate rain-drinking are weird. That rain is our sunlight, Professor Beard. It drenches our planet, drives our climate and its life. A sweet rain of photons, and all we have to do is hold out our cups! D’you know, I read this guy saying somewhere that less than an hour’s worth of all the sunlight falling on the earth would satisfy the whole world’s needs for a year.’

  Unimpressed, Beard said, ‘And what was this guy taking as his measure of solar irradiance?’

  ‘One quarter of the solar constant.’

  ‘Too optimistic. You’d need to halve that again.’

  ‘My point stands, Professor Beard. Solar arrays on a tiny fraction of the world’s deserts would give us all the power we need.’

  The Norfolk lad’s bucolic tone, so at odds with what he was saying, was beginning to aggravate Beard’s raw condition. He said sullenly, ‘If you could distribute it.’

  ‘Yes. New DC lines! That’s just money and effort. Worth it for the planet! For our future, Professor Beard!’

  Beard snapped the pages of his speech to indicate that the conversation was at a close. The essence of a crank was, firstly, to believe that all the world’s problems could be reduced to one, and be solved. And secondly, to go on about it non-stop.

  But Tom Aldous was not done with him yet. As they arrived at the Centre and the gates were raised, he said, as though there had been no break in the discussion, ‘That’s why, I mean, no disrespect, that’s why I think we’re wasting our time with this micro wind-power stuff. The technology’s already good enough. The government just needs to make it attractive to people – it’s stroke-of-the-pen stuff, the market will do the rest. There’s so much money to be made. But solar – cutting-edge artificial photosynthesis – there’s great basic research to do on the nanotechnology. Professor, it could be us!’

  Aldous was holding open the door and Beard was climbing wearily out. He said, ‘Thank you for your thoughts. But really, you should learn to keep your eyes on the road.’ And he turned away to shake Braby’s hand.

  On his weekly round, therefore, he hoped to avoid running into Aldous alone, for the young man was always trying to convince him of photovoltaics, or his quantum explanation of photovoltaics, or to oppress him generally with friendliness and enthusiasm, and seemed oblivious to Beard’s surliness whenever he repeated the case for dropping WUDU. Of course it ought to be abandoned, when it was devouring nearly all the budget and growing in complication as it diminished in interest. But it had been Beard’s idea, and reversing it would be a personal disaster. So he was coming to dislike this young man, his big-boned goofy face and flaring nostrils, his ponytail, his wrist bracelet of grubby red and green string intertwined, his holier-than-thou diet of salad and yoghurt in the canteen, his habit of bringing his tray over unasked and sitting as close as possible to the Chief, who could only be depressed to learn that Aldous had boxed for Norfolk in the county championships, had rowed for his college at Cambridge, had come seventh in a San Francisco marathon. There were novels Aldous wanted him to read – novels! – and developments in contemporary music he thought Beard should be aware of, and movies that were of particular relevance, documentaries about climate change which Aldous had seen at least twice but would happily see again if there was a chance of making the Chief sit through them too. Aldous had a mind that was designed, through the medium of a Norfolk accent, to offer tireless advice, make recommenda
tions, urge changes, or express enthusiasm for some journey or holiday or book or vitamin, which itself was a form of exhortation. Nothing eroded Beard’s goodwill more than to hear again that he must spend a month in the Vale of Swat.

  In the building where once brick dust and fibreglass insulation had been tested for non-beneficial effects, he wandered between labs and listened to progress reports from engineers, designers and mysteriously termed energy consultants, who were responsible for a long document called ‘Discovering Micro Wind 4.2’, of which he could not bring himself to read even the first paragraph. During that summer so many were taken on by the Department of Human Resources, which had just been taken on itself, that each week he was obliged to explain who he was to half a dozen strangers. There were very few who were not busy with WUDU, and as he went about, Beard became more downhearted. For all the toil, nothing was ready for testing at Farnborough, no one had really addressed the turbulence problem, and no one was thinking much about what might happen when the wind did not blow because no one had the first idea about storing electricity cheaply and efficiently. That would have been a radical project, designing a powerful new battery for domestic supply, but it was too late to suggest it now, with everyone committed to WUDU, and besides, battery research was what Tom Aldous kept suggesting. Far better to build a boutique nuclear reactor on the Dorset Jurassic Coast than to wreck a million roofs with the shearing and vibration, the backward force and twist and torque of some worthless gadget for which the wind was rarely strong enough to motivate a useful current.