Out of the Sun (39 page)

"You mean David?"

"And perhaps one other: Srinivasa Ramanujan, the genius from Madras. His surviving work on modular functions suggests that, if he'd lived to read The Implicate Topology of Complex Numbers, its significance would not have been lost on him. But Ramanujan died two years before I was born, aged just thirty-three."

The same age as David."

"Yes." She caressed the notebooks once more. "Thirty-three. A magic number, mathematicians call it. One that recurs in calculations when least expected, for reasons that cannot be fathomed."

"Except by you?"

Her hand slipped away. She leant back in her chair. "My work attracted distinguished attention, despite its esotericism, or perhaps because of it. I was invited to Princeton largely on account of Godel's interest in the book, which in turn aroused Einstein's curiosity. It was there that I made two important discoveries. Firstly, that it might be possible to train the mind to the point where its grasp of the numerological underpinnings of higher dimensions became so sure, so natural, so instinctive, that one might take the mental leap to direct experience of them."

"That's crazy."

"Think that if it will help you sleep at night. But I'm only describing to you a path I've already trodden. The existence of higher dimensions has been mathematically verified many times. The compactification theory is a post hoc rationalization. It evades the issue. Ask Miss Trangam how much of the brain we fully understand. If she answers honestly, she will say: hardly any of it. What we call consciousness is partial awareness. The rest is locked up here." She tapped her forehead. "Waiting for us to turn the key."

"As you've done?"

"In a sense. But a key can lock as well as unlock. That was my second discovery."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that what's possible is not necessarily desirable. Imagine you are aware of only two spatial dimensions: length and breadth. Then imagine I take a hula hoop, pass it over your head and lower it to the floor around your feet. You have thus become my prisoner. You cannot escape."

"Why not? I only have to step over it."

"But you can't. Height and therefore the idea of raising your foot, the very act of stepping itself is beyond your conception. You don't believe height exists. The hula hoop is to you an impassable barrier. You're trapped by the limitations of your own senses."

"You're just playing with words."

"I'm not playing at all. If this room had neither doors nor windows, you would agree we could never leave it?"

"I suppose so, but '

"I could simply step out of it, as you would step out of the hula hoop." For a moment, Harry could think of no riposte. Athene smiled at him, a smile not so much of superiority as of protectiveness. "Don't you see, Harry? The power conferred on those who attain an awareness of higher dimensions is a power over those who don't. To entrap. To manipulate. To spy. To hurt. And ultimately to kill without the slightest fear of detection. Who would know who could ever find out if I squeezed your heart until it stopped beating?"

"That's not.. . possible."

"Why not? If skin and bone are no more a barrier than a hula hoop encircling your feet."

"But they are more. What you're saying is ... madness."

The attempt may end in madness, certainly. It did in poor Carl's case. The intellect is a fragile thing. It cannot take too much pressure."

"You're saying an attempt to become aware of higher dimensions .. . drove Dobermann mad?"

"I'm saying there are clues to be found in The Implicate Topology of Complex Numbers. Clues that form a trail two of my students have, over the years, tried to follow. I can't erase the clues. Only time can do that. When I am dead as well as forgotten, and the last copy of my book has mouldered on some dusty shelf of some obscure library, then mankind will be safe from the secret."

"Mankind?"

"Is worth protecting from its own folly. Wouldn't you say?"

"I'd say it depends who's doing the protecting. And why."

"I am, Harry. As to why, I found reason enough at Princeton in the fifties. First there was Oppenheimer, willing nay, eager to confess what it felt like to have placed immense destructive power in the hands of his fellow humans. Remember what he said at the time. "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Well, he meant it. He had known sin, he told me. He had brought evil to life. From a single atom of uranium. If we'd sat here a century ago and I'd told you a glob of matter no larger than a grapefruit could lay waste half of Suffolk, you'd have said it was what was your word? madness. But that madness became the linchpin of this country's defence strategy. And MAD was the acronym used to describe it.

Then there was Einstein, who'd paved the way for the atom-smashers fifty years before with the chilling simplicity of the equation he's universally remembered for. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. With that, he laid the fuse for Oppenheimer to ignite. And he too recoiled from the consequences.

"I became a regular afternoon caller at Einstein's office, ostensibly because he valued my contribution to his work on unified field theory. Actually, he wanted an audience for his doubts about the desirability of scientific progress. And he was shrewd enough to sense that I needed to be warned. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had proved to his satisfaction that the human consequences of scientific inquiry are always incalculable and are never as positive as the scientist predicts. His biographers generally interpret the inconclusive nature of his work on unified field theory as evidence of his mental decline in old age, but I suspect he may have deliberately dragged his feet. And may have picked holes in quantum theory for much the same reason. He feared a widening gap between knowledge and the moral maturity of mankind. And he foresaw disaster if the gap was not narrowed.

"I've no doubt Einstein was right. Some discoveries are best avoided. Or delayed. Or hidden. Carl's disintegration proved that and I wish for no more compelling illustration. I've published nothing on the subject of higher dimensions since The Implicate Topology of Complex Numbers. I've taught only what others can teach. It has not been easy. I've often craved recognition and reward for what I've achieved, though with age such cravings -like most others have diminished. If I were a man, I might have given way. But women take a broader view. I've held my tongue and my brain in check. And my reward is freedom from the guilt that troubled Einstein and Oppenheimer and their fellow physicists who lived in the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

"You'll think it odd that I should claim to feel no guilt in view of what I'm about to tell you. But it's true. I've examined my conscience and am clear on the point. What I did had to be done. The sin would have been to do nothing. To while away my days here and let the next generation grapple with the consequences. It was tempting, believe me. I wanted none of this. But it had to be."

"None of whatT

"Murder, in the strict legal definition. I've murdered three men. And your son was one of them."

"You admit that?"

"Would there be any point denying it?"

"But.. . whyT

"I've told you why. Like Carl, David saw the true significance of my work. But much more clearly. His intellect was equal to the task. And piercing enough to see through my concealments. I can follow his progress in these notebooks, edging ever closer over a decade and more. The wrong turnings and the false hopes. But also the slow advances, the brilliant intuitions and the flashes of pure genius. Till in the latest of them he was only a few short steps behind me.

"When he came here last September, it was to proclaim his discoveries and to unveil his plans for HYDRA. I tried to preach caution to him, but he wouldn't listen. He already saw himself as the founder of a new scientific generation of the hyper-dimensionally aware. He was terribly convincing. I could see he would make it happen. The promise of funding he'd extorted from Lazenby and the originality of his most recent work would have opened the door. Within his lifespan, mankind would have had to cope with the creation of a powerful elite of hyper-dimensionally trained mathematicians."

"I thought you said the ability was latent in all of us."

"So it is. But accessible only to the mathematically gifted. At least to begin with. A beginning that would certainly last several generations. During which those denied such training or intellectually incapable of benefiting from it would inevitably be reduced to a position little short of servitude. David saw none of that, of course. He anticipated only universal prosperity and the general advancement of the species. My fears were dismissed with the confidence and the myopia of youth. I was left with no alternative. To safeguard the future, I had to act. In short, I had to stop him. And there was only one way to do it."

"You killed him? Because of the effect his work might have had on the future?"

"Would have, for certain. He didn't suffer, Harry. I made sure of that. He was sleeping. Dreaming, perhaps, of the better world he fondly supposed his discoveries would usher in. A dream he never woke from. It's as generous a fate as any of us can hope for."

"You call two months on life support.. . gene rousT

"I call it a tragic misfortune. It was never my intention that his life should have such a pointless epilogue. I left a DO NOT DISTURB sign on his door that was evidently removed. Who knows why or by whom? If it had gone on hanging there .. . But we are all, including me, the playthings of chance. And of our own mis judgements

"Oh, so you're not infallible, then?"

"Far from it. If I'd ever thought I was, Hammelgaard's visit a week later disabused me. He was looking for the notebooks, mystified by their absence from David's hotel room. It became apparent as we talked that he knew too much about David's work to let it lie. He'd have pressed on with it. More slowly, it's true, and probably less coherently. But he'd already gleaned enough to get there in the end. And to persuade others to join him in the endeavour. By the time he'd left, I'd reluctantly concluded that he too had to be stopped." She paused, reading the dismay in Harry's face. "I had to finish what I'd started. Don't you see? I was trading two lives against a catastrophic future."

"Two? A moment ago, you admitted to three murders."

"Yes. Because one sudden death in mysterious circumstances, as David's was supposed to have been, made nobody very curious, whereas two when both victims were researching higher dimensions carried the risk of arousing unhealthy suspicion. I needed to lay a false trail. Mermillod had come to see me a few weeks before, trying to buy information with which to blacken David's name. He'd even had the effrontery to offer me some kind of sinecure at IHES in exchange for lending my name to a campaign ridiculing David's hyper-dimensional theories. He was an unpleasant man and had obviously been put up to it by Lazenby. I wasn't susceptible to his bribes, of course. But they gave me an idea. Three deaths would look suspicious. But if all three victims were former employees of Globescope, that's where the suspicion would be directed. Mermillod had angered me. So, indirectly, had Lazenby. I decided to use them to solve my problem. I persuaded myself that Mermillod was asking for it. As I rather think he was."

"And Kersey? Was he "asking for it"?"

"Not at all. But then I didn't kill Kersey. His death really was an accident. A singularly untimely one, since it convinced the other participants in Project Sybil that there was a plot against them. They went into hiding. And suddenly Hammelgaard was out of my reach. Lying low in Copenhagen, I had no doubt. But if I went in search of him, there was a danger of undermining the Globe-scope conspiracy theory just when it was gathering momentum. How could I go looking for him in a strange city without my name becoming known there, my face recognized, my interest in him remembered and remarked upon? No, no. I could only travel in secret and strike covertly. I needed somebody else to hunt him down. And I chose .. . you."

Harry opened his mouth to speak, but could find no words to express the conflict he felt between doubt and understanding. She had asked him at the outset whether he was sure he wanted the truth. Now, his answer might have been different.

"I was the one who phoned the Mitre Bridge Service Station on the seventeenth of October and left the message for you. I calculated correctly that once you knew David was your son, you wouldn't stop until you'd led me to Hammelgaard. You're the sort who never gives up, you see. The sort with so little to lose you'll move mountains when somebody offers you something to care about. I'd read about you in the papers when you were implicated in the disappearance of that girl in Rhodes. I'd noted how the story ended. I'd remembered you as the kind of man who won't take no for an answer. And last October I realized I needed such a man.

"I sent you the newspaper cutting a few days later to make sure you'd follow the trail here. You'd have done so eventually, anyway, but time was beginning to press. I knew you'd follow my advice and go looking for Hammelgaard in Copenhagen. It was inevitable. When you did, I went with you. No doubt you thought you travelled alone. But not so. I was with you, every step of the way. Except when I was waiting for Hammelgaard on Knippelsbro

and you still hadn't arrived."

That can't be true."

"But it is. He didn't see me. He didn't know it was about to happen even a split-second before it did. There was no pain and no anticipation. I think you glimpsed me on the bridge, didn't you

sensed how close I was?"

"No," Harry insisted in the teeth of his own memory's evidence. "I sensed nothing."

"Have it your way. At all events, it culminated there. With Hammelgaard's death, the secret was sealed. Everything you went on to achieve in America was merely window-dressing, I'm afraid. Or should have been. Unfortunately, it wasn't as simple as that. David's contact with Carl and Carl's subsequent abscondence from Hudson Valley were shocking discoveries to me. David had clearly been more suspicious of me than I'd given him credit for. As for Carl, the connection with me he represented was a real danger. I knew that if you learnt of it, you'd start to piece the truth together. I did all I could to stop you. Hackensack's accident; your loss of Rosenbaum's address: every distraction I could think of. But I suppose I knew all along they could only really be delays. You were bound to work your way back to me in the end."