PopCo (57 page)
I wonder what my grandfather thought as he finished formulating his idea for a coded proof that would show that he knew what the missing document was. Did he think that he’d be able to create a sensible number that he could have engraved on a necklace for me? Something I would know to prime factorise, then recognise as a Gödel code and then compare to the frequency table? He can’t have done. The number that you get when you run that lot through Gödel’s code is 49 digits long. It doesn’t even fit on a calculator properly …
Sometime on Saturday afternoon I actually do it, though: I get my calculator and I type in the calculation. 2
3
× 3
6
× 5
2
× 7
7
× 11
13
× 13
11
× 17
1
× 19
8
. And when I see the result, I almost pass out. It is exactly what is on my necklace: 2.14488156Ex48, a number that, all my life, I have known better than my phone number. The number is not correct, of course, but it is what you get when you type that sum into a calculator. And at that moment I understand. My grandfather, for whatever reason, never intended me to break the necklace code and get the answer. The necklace code was the way you
checked
the answer, not the way you
obtained
it. My grandfather must have hoped that I would, at some point, come up with the word ‘Articles’, and that I would know how to run it through my necklace, via Fletcher Pratt, via Gödel, and understand that it was the right answer.
Or maybe not. Maybe he always meant to simply tell me how to do it, but never got around to it. After all, towards the end of his life he was so obsessed with Voynich that nothing else really mattered. No. I think I know what the necklace was actually for: it’s obvious. If anyone disputed the fact that my grandfather had come up with the answer – or, say, if someone else said they’d come up with it first – all he’d have to do would be to get the necklace, prove I’d been wearing it since 1982 (and, yes, of course there are pictures of me wearing it then) and then show his challenger that if you put the word ‘Articles’ through Gödel’s code in the way he did, you get exactly what is on my necklace. He knew that the people who would challenge him would not necessarily be mathematicians, and might be from the press, or even the police. And the last thing you would want to use as proof in a case like this would be a number too big to show on a normal pocket calculator. This way was perfect. My grandfather would have imagined it, I know he would. He would have imagined standing there with his calculator, putting the numbers in, and coming up with exactly what was on my necklace.
Late on Sunday night I am still sitting by the trunk, looking through my grandfather’s papers. And it’s about 1 am, after a takeaway pizza and lots of green tea, that I finally see the actual number. It’s at the top of a ten-page document: a list of other, smaller numbers. It says: 2144881560001920185896805344125304809323777694600.
And that’s it, the 49-digit number. And yes, if you prime factorise it, you get 2
3
× 3
3
× 5
2
× 7
7
× 11
13
× 13
11
× 17
1
× 19
8
. So maybe my grandfather did imagine that one day I would find it, this piece of paper, and that I would know what to do with it.
I smile, deliberately casting my eyes upwards (to Heaven? The ether?), and I wish he was here so I could tell him that I have already done it: I’ve worked out his code. But I know what he’d say to me next. He’d say, ‘Go on then, clever clogs, do the next bit. Work out what the Articles say, and then work out where the treasure is.’ I sigh, knowing that this bit is going to take the most time, even if I don’t have to construct the Articles from scratch as he had to. No. The Articles are here in this document, with the Gödel number for ‘Articles’ at the top. What I have to do now is work out which text my grandfather would have used to encode it. And so I look at the photograph again, I consider everything he ever taught me about code-breaking, and then I go to the shelf and take down the book.
Thank you to Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski, as usual; Simon Trewin, for facing the world on my behalf; Leo Hollis, for rescuing me back in 2000; Jenna Johnson, for doing such a great and thoughtful job with the American edit; Suzi Feay, for giving me the best job in the world and all the amazing books that go with it; Hari Ashurst-Venn, for the guitar sessions; Emilie Clarke, for letting me treat her bookshop like a library; Lucy Wright, for talking to me about seeds; Allen Clarke, for teaching me about sailing; Jason Kennedy, for the sanctuary; Sam Ashurst, for one particular conversation; Mel McMahon, for all the homeopathic books and advice; Tony Mann, for checking the solution for me, and providing about twenty missing zeros; Francesca Ashurst for reading; and Couze Venn for looking after me.
Thanks also to the American Cryptogram Association for letting me use their name, and that of their publication,
The Cryptogram
. Thanks to Stewart Dean for letting me use his Life game on my website. Thanks also to the Torbay Local History Library and all the Torbay librarians. I couldn’t have done this without all the books and the many hours of research.
I couldn’t possibly list all the books I have used in this project. Many of them, although useful, don’t deserve a mention. They are the marketing books, the trend studies and the guides on selling products to children. These will be recycled. The following list contains the books which I most loved during the PopCo project, and the ones I think readers may also enjoy.
- The Code Book
by Simon Singh (4th Estate, 2000) - The
Codebreakers
by David Khan (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967) - The Magical Maze
by Ian Stewart (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997) - The Music of the Primes
by Marcus du Sautoy (4th Estate, 2003) - Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
by Douglas R. Hofstadter (Penguin Books, 1981) - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul
Erdös
and the Search for Mathematical Truth
by Paul Hoffman (4th Estate, 1999) - The Colossal Book of Mathematics: Classic Puzzles, Paradoxes
And Problems
by Martin Gardner (W. W. Norton, 2001) - Six Degrees of Separation: The Science of a Connected Age
by Duncan J. Watts (William Heinemann, 2003) - Obedience to Authority
by Stanley Milgram (Tavistock, 1974) - Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G. I. Joe, Barbie and the
Companies Who Make Them
by G. Wayne Miller (Times Books, 1998) - No Logo
by Naomi Klein (Flamingo, 2000) - Fences and Windows
by Naomi Klein (Flamingo, 2002) - The Algebra of Infinite Justice
by Arundhati Roy (Flamingo, 2002) - Animal Liberation
by Peter Singer (Pimlico, 1995) - Fast Food Nation
by Eric Schlosser (Penguin, 2002) - So Shall We Reap
by Colin Tudge (Allen Lane, 2003) - Woman on the Edge of Time
by Marge Piercy (Women’s Press, 1979) - Between Silk and Cyanide
by Leo Marks (HarperCollins, 1998) - Nancy Wake: The Inspiring Story of One of the
War’s
Greatest
Heroines
by Peter Fitzsimons (HarperCollins, 2002)
Read on for a taster of Scarlett Thomas’s next novel …
Y
OU NOW HAVE ONE CHOICE
.
You
… I’m hanging out of the window of my office, sneaking a cigarette and trying to read
Margins
in the dull winter light, when there’s a noise I haven’t heard before. All right, the noise – crash, bang, etc. – I probably have heard before, but it’s coming from under neath me, which isn’t right. There shouldn’t be any thing underneath me: I’m on the bottom floor. But the ground shakes, as if something’s trying to push up from below, and I think about other people’s mothers shaking out their duvets or even God shaking out the fabric of space–time; then I think, Fucking hell, it’s an earthquake, and I drop my cigarette and run out of my office at roughly the same time that the alarm starts sounding.
When alarms sound I don’t always run immediately. Who
does? Usually an alarm is just an empty sign: a drill; a practice. I’m on my way to the side door out of the building when the shaking stops. Shall I go back to my office? But it’s impossible to stay in this building when this alarm goes off. It’s too loud; it wails inside your head. As I leave the building I walk past the Health and Safety notice board, which has pictures of injured people on it. The pictures blur as I go past: a man who has back pain is also having a heart attack, and various hologram people are trying to revive him. I was supposed to go to some Health and Safety training last year, but didn’t.
As I open the side door I can see people leaving the Russell Building and walking, or running, past our block and up the grey concrete steps in the direction of the Newton Building and the library. I cut around the right-hand side of the building and bound up the concrete steps, two at a time. The sky is grey, with a thin TV-static drizzle that hangs in the air like it’s been freeze-framed. Sometimes, on these January afternoons, the sun squats low in the sky like an orange-robed Buddha in a documentary about the meaning of life. Today there is no sun. I come to the edge of the large crowd that has formed, and I stop running. Everyone is looking at the same thing, gasping and making firework-display noises.
It’s the Newton Building.
It’s falling down.
I think of this toy – have I seen it on someone’s desk recently? – which is a little horse mounted on a wooden button. When you press the button from underneath, the horse collapses to its knees. That’s what the Newton Building looks like now. It’s sinking into the ground, but in a lopsided way; one corner is
now gone, now two, now … Now it stops. It creaks, and it stops. A window on the third floor flaps open, and a computer monitor falls out and smashes onto what’s left of the concrete courtyard below. Four men with hard hats and fluorescent jackets slowly approach the broken-up courtyard; then another man comes, says something to them, and they all move away again.
Two men in grey suits are standing next to me.
‘Déjà vu,’ one of them says to the other.
I look around for someone I know. There’s Mary Robinson, the head of department, talking to Lisa Hobbes. I can’t see many other people from the English Department. But I can see Max Truman standing on his own, smoking a roll-up. He’ll know what’s going on.
‘Hello, Ariel,’ he mumbles when I walk over and stand next to him.
Max always mumbles; not in a shy way, but rather as if he’s telling you what it will cost to take out your worst enemy, or how much you’d have to pay to rig a horse race. Does he like me? I don’t think he trusts me. But why would he? I’m comparatively young, relatively new to the department, and I probably seem ambitious, even though I’m not. I also have long red hair and people say I look intimidating (because of the hair? Something else?). People who don’t say I look intimidating sometimes say I look ‘dodgy’ or ‘odd’. One of my ex-housemates said he wouldn’t like to be stuck on a desert island with me, but didn’t say why.
‘Hi, Max,’ I say. Then: ‘Wow.’
‘You probably don’t know about the tunnel, do you?’ he says. I shake my head. ‘There’s a railway tunnel that runs under
here,’ he says, pointing downwards with his eyes. He sucks on his roll-up, but nothing seems to happen, so he takes it out of his mouth and uses it to point around the campus. ‘It runs under Russell over there, and Newton over there. Goes – or used to go – from the town to the coast. It hasn’t been used in a hundred years or so. This is the second time it’s collapsed and taken Newton with it. They were supposed to fill it with concrete after last time,’ he adds.
I look at where Max just pointed, and start mentally drawing straight lines connecting Newton with Russell, imagining the tunnel underneath the line. Whichever way you do it, the English and American Studies Building is on the line, too.
‘Everyone’s all right, at least,’ he says. ‘Maintenance saw a crack in the wall this morning and evacuated them all.’
Lisa shivers. ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ she says, looking over at the Newton Building. The grey sky has darkened and the rain is now falling more heavily. The Newton Building looks strange with no lights on: it’s as if it has been stubbed out.
‘I can’t either,’ I say.
For the next three or four minutes we all stand and stare in silence at the building; then a man with a megaphone comes around and tells us all to go home immediately without going back to our offices. I feel like crying. There’s something so sad about broken concrete.
I don’t know about everyone else, but it’s not that easy for me just to go home. I only have one set of keys to my flat, and that set is in my office, along with my coat, my scarf, my gloves, my hat and my rucksack.
There’s a security guard trying to stop people going in through the main entrance, so I go down the steps and in the side way. My name isn’t on my office door. Instead, it bears only the name of the official occupier of the room: my supervisor, Professor Saul Burlem. I met Burlem twice before I came here: once at a conference in Greenwich, and once at my interview. He disappeared just over a week after I arrived. I remember coming into the office on a Thursday morning and noticing that it was different. The first thing was that the blinds and the curtains were closed: Burlem always closed his blinds at the end of every day, but neither of us ever touched the horrible thin grey curtains. And the room smelled of cigarette smoke. I was expecting him in at about ten o’clock that morning, but he didn’t show up. By the following Monday I asked people where he was and they said they didn’t know. At some point someone arranged for his classes to be covered. I don’t know if there’s departmental gossip about this – no one gossips to me – but everyone seems to assume I’ll just carry on my research and it’s no big deal for me that he isn’t around. Of course, he’s the reason I came to the department at all: he’s the only person in the world who has done serious research on one of my main subjects, the nineteenth-century writer Thomas E. Lumas. Without Burlem, I’m not really sure why I am here. And I do feel something about him being missing; not loss, exactly, but something.
My car is in the Newton car park. When I get there I am not at all surprised to find several men in hard hats telling people to forget about their cars and walk or take the bus home. I do
try to argue – I say I’m happy to take the risk that the Newton Building will not suddenly go into a slow-motion cinematic rewind in order that it can fall down again in a completely different direction – but the men pretty much tell me to piss off and walk home or take the bus like everybody else, so I eventually drift off in the direction of the bus stop. It’s only the beginning of January, but some daffodils and snowdrops have made it through the earth and stand wetly in little rows by the path. The bus stop is depressing: there’s a line of people looking as cold and fragile as the line of flowers, so I decide I’ll just walk.
I think there’s a shortcut into town through the woods, but I don’t know where it is, so I just follow the route I would have driven until I leave the campus, playing the scene of the building collapsing in my mind over and over again until, realising I’m remembering things that never even happened, I give up thinking about it at all. Then I consider the railway tunnel. I can see why it would be there: after all, the campus is set on top of a steep hill and it would make sense to go under rather than over it. Max said it hadn’t been used for a hundred years or so. I wonder what was on this hill a hundred years ago. Not the university, of course, which was built in the 1960s. It’s so cold. Perhaps I should have waited for the bus. But no buses pass me as I walk. By the time I get to the main road into town my fingers have frozen inside my gloves and I start examining roads off to the right, looking for a shortcut. The first one is marked with a no through road sign, partially obscured by seagull shit; but the second looks more promising, with red-brick terraced houses curling around to the left, so I take it.
I thought this was just a residential road, but soon the red-brick houses stop and there’s a small park with two swings and a slide rusting under a dark canopy of tangled but bare oak-tree branches. Beyond that there is a pub and then a small row of shops. There’s a sad-looking charity shop, already shut, and the kind of hairdresser that does blue rinses and sets for half price on a Monday. There’s a newsagent and a betting shop and then – aha – a secondhand bookshop. It’s still open. I’m freezing. I go in.
It’s warm inside the shop and smells slightly of furniture polish. The door has a little bell that keeps jangling for a good three seconds after I close it, and soon a young woman comes out from behind a large set of bookshelves, holding a can of polish and a yellow duster. She smiles briefly and tells me that the shop will be closing in about ten minutes, but I am welcome to look around. Then she sits down and starts tapping something into a keyboard connected to a computer on the front desk.
‘Have you got a computerised catalogue of all your books?’ I ask her.
She stops typing and looks up. ‘Yeah. But I don’t know how to use it. I’m only filling in for my friend. Sorry.’
‘Oh. OK.’
‘What did you want to look up?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘No, tell me. I might remember dusting it.’
‘Um … OK, then. Well, there’s this author called Thomas E. Lumas … Have you got any books by him?’ I always ask this in secondhand bookshops. They rarely do have anything
by him, and I’ve got most of his books already, but I still ask. I still hope for a better copy of something, or an older one. Something with a different preface or a cleaner dust jacket.
‘Er …’ She screws up her forehead. ‘The name sounds sort of familiar.’
‘You might have come across something called
The Apple in
the Garden
. That’s his famous one. But none of the others are in print. He wrote in the mid to late nineteenth century, but never became as famous as he should have been …’
‘
The Apple in the Garden
. No, the one I saw wasn’t that one,’ she says. ‘Hang on.’ She walks around to the large bookcase at the back of the shop. ‘L, Lu, Lumas … No. Nothing here,’ she says. ‘Mind you, I don’t know what section they’d have put him in. Is it fiction?’
‘Some is fiction,’ I say. ‘But he also wrote a book about thought experiments, some poetry, a treatise on government, several science books and something called
The End of Mr. Y
, which is one of the rarest novels …’
‘
The End of Mr. Y
. That’s it!’ she says, excited. ‘Hang on.’
She goes up the stairs at the back of the shop before I can tell her that she must be mistaken. It is impossible to imagine that she actually has a copy up there. I would probably give away everything I own to obtain a copy of
The End of Mr. Y
, Lumas’s last and most mysterious work. I don’t know what she’s got it confused with, but it’s just absurd to think that she has it. No one has that book. There is one known copy in a German bank vault, but no library has it listed. I have a feeling that Saul Burlem may have seen a copy once, but I’m not sure.
The End
of Mr. Y
is supposed to be cursed, and although I obviously
don’t believe in any of that stuff, some people do think that if you read it you die.
‘Yeah, here it is,’ says the girl, carrying a small cardboard box down the stairs. ‘Is this the one you mean?’
She places the box on the counter.
I look inside. And – suddenly I can’t breathe – there it is: a small cream clothbound hardback with brown lettering on the cover and spine, missing a dust jacket but otherwise near perfect. But it can’t be. I open the cover and read the title page and the publication details. Oh, shit. This is a copy of
The End of Mr. Y
. What the hell do I do now?
‘How much is it?’ I ask carefully, my voice as small as a pin.
‘Yeah, that’s the problem,’ she says, turning the box around. ‘The owner gets boxes like this from an auction in town, I think, and if they’re upstairs it means they haven’t been priced yet.’ She smiles. ‘I probably shouldn’t have shown it to you at all. Can you come back tomorrow when she’s in?’
‘Not really …’ I start to say.
Ideas beam through my mind like cosmic rays. Shall I tell her I’m not from around here and ask her to ring the owner now? No. The owner clearly doesn’t know that the book is here. I don’t want to take the risk that she will have heard of it and then refuse to sell it to me – or try to charge thousands of pounds. What can I say to make her give me the book? Seconds pass. The girl seems to be picking up the phone on the desk.
‘I’ll just give my friend a ring,’ she says. ‘I’ll find out what to do.’
While she waits for the call to connect, I glance into the box. It’s unbelievable, but there are other Lumas books there, and a
couple of Derrida translations that I don’t have, as well as what looks like a first edition of
Eureka!
by Edgar Allan Poe. How did these texts end up in a box together? I can’t imagine anyone connecting them, unless it was for a project similar to my PhD. Could someone else be working on the same thing? Unlikely, especially if they have given the books away. But who would give these books away? I feel as though I’m looking at Paley’s watch. It’s as if someone put this box together just to appeal to me.
