Making history

There you have Jane in a nutshell. There you have scientists in a nutshell. Wriggle, wriggle, wriggle. They suck.

She was reading some South American novelist when I put my bedside light out. 'Ner-night,' she mumbled.

I stared at the ceiling. 'That man Hamilton,' I said. 'Remember him? In Dunblane. He walks into a primary school gymnasium with four handguns. In three minutes, fifteen five-year-olds and a teacher are dead. A human being points a gun at a child and watches the bullet explode in its skull. Picture the screams, the blood, the complete incomprehension in those children's eyes. Yet he does it again and again and again. Aiming and pulling the trigger.'

I She put the book down. 'What are you trying to say?' 'I don't know. I don't know. But isn't that what we should be trying to understand?'

'I hope you aren't bringing up that dreadful case as proof that your heart is bigger than mine, or your subject more important.'

'No, I don't mean that. I don't. Really I don't.' 'Pup, you're crying!'

'It's nothing.'

Pumping along Queens' Road the next morning I explained the whole deal to myself. Humiliation. It was that simple. Fraser-Stuart had hurt me more than I had been prepared to admit. It was all a big, angry blush. I had behaved like a spoilt child because I was scared at the prospect of my passage out of studenthood and into the land of grown-ups. That was cool. It was no more than a natural little tantrum. Like I said about doors, about hovering on thresholds. Saying farewell to the long, happy process of being a good, clever little boy who writes essays and earns praise and writes more essays and earns more praise. At seven I was smarter than most ten-year-olds, at fourteen smarter than a seventeen-year- old, at seventeen smarter than a twenty-year-old. Twentyfour now, I was no smarter than any other twenty-four-

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year-old around the place and anyway, it was no longer a race and there were no more prizes for being a prodigy. Everyone had caught up with me and I knew, I understood with a sharp gutstab of horror, that the danger now was that I would stand still while they raced past. One self-righteous, puritanical little outburst was permissible, surely, before I began the long uphill slog to discipline and diligence, integrity and industry, caution and care? I was allowed to kick and scream just once as I watched the dazzle and brilliance of youth cloud over.

Like I say, I don't half think some crap sometimes.

Along the Madingley Road I skimmed, bent low over the handlebars. The Cavendish Laboratories loomed ahead, not a cathedral to the antichrist, just a building, an assembly of edge-of-town sheds. The people who laboured there had good hearts and bad hearts like anyone else. They didn't regard themselves as holding the only key to human understanding. They just

hunted their particles, their genes, their forces and their wave forms, like historians hunting for documents or twitchers scanning the skies for red kites. Jane must think I'm mad. On the verge of a breakdown. No, she understands, bless her buns. She knows exactly what's what and she loves it. Mummy's little handful.

The original Cavendish laboratories, where Rutherford sharpened the axe that split his first atom, are in the centre of Cambridge, but the new building is out past Churchill College and towards the American Cemetery and Madingley.

Is sunset still a golden sea From Haslingfield to Madingley?

No, Rupert dear, it isn't. More of a carbon monoxide fog, I'm afraid. Nor does the church clock stand at ten to three. As for there being honey still for tea, you'll have to ask Jeffrey Archer, since he owns the Old Vicarage now. Perhaps someone should write a new Grantchester.

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Say, stand the bollards yet in rows Mute guardians of the contraflows? Are there stabbings after dark And is it still a cunt to park?

God bless our century. The main lab too, like an officeblock: all glass, swing-doors and 'Reception! May I help you at all?' Privatised peak caps, sign-in books, laminated visitor badges, the whole vindaloo.

If there is a word to describe our age, it must be Security, or to put it another way, Insecurity. From the neurotic insecurity of Freud, by way of the insecurities

of the Kaiser, the Fiihrer, Eisenhower and Stalin, right up to the terrors of the citizens of the modern world -

THEY ARE OUT THERE!

The enemy. They will break into your car, burgle your house, molest your children, consign you to hellfire, murder you for drug money, force you to face Mecca, infect your blood, outlaw your sexual preferences, erode your pension, pollute your beaches, censor your thoughts, steal your ideas, poison your air, threaten your values, use foul language on your television, destroy your security. Keep them away! Lock them out! Hide them from sight! Bury them!

Half my friends from school have - in sharp contradistinction to my own previously explained failure in this regard - successfully rechristened themselves Speeder, Bozzle, Volo, Turtle, Grip and Janga, pierced any spare folds of flesh they can and pinned them with gold, silver and brass and hit the road. They march down the high streets of southern towns in anti-pollution masks, hoisting skull and crossbone banners: they'll fight against the car, the Criminal Justice Act, highways, the felling of trees, the raising of powerplants ... anything. They want to be the ones locked out; they like to be thought of as dangerous; they enjoy their exile.

And they think I'm a dick.

I went to visit Janga last year, in Brighton, one of the places where she and her Traveller friends congregate, and I could tell, oh yes, I could tell, that these free souls

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thought me quite the little dick. Were I a real dick, mind, and a nasty dick at that, I would say to you at this point that they had no objection at all to me buying them

drink after drink after drink in the pubs, that it posed no moral problem for them whatsoever to send me out to the mini-market at eight in the morning to buy their milk and bread and newspapers. I would say too that it is possible to be a waycool eco-warrior without smelling of dead baglady. I could add that anyone can be a hero on the dole. But that kind of argument is beneath me, so I say nothing. In the lobby, I stand now in a shaft of sunlight and bear with good grace the frownings of those who flap past me. So I'm not wearing a lab coat. So have me killed. Teh! These people ...

'Michael, Michael, Michael! So sorry to keep you waiting,' Leo's white coat is appropriately stained and a comical three sizes too small for his long arms. 'Come, come come.'

Obedient puppy, I follow along the corridors, rising to my toes on the stride to catch glimpses of labs through the high glazing of the corridor walls.

We come to a door. 'NC 1.54 (D) Professor L Zuckermann.' Leo swipes down a card: a green light glows, a small beep beeps, a lock clunks and the door swings open. I pause at the threshold and mutter unhappily, like Michael Hordern in Where Eagles Dare, 'Security? That word has become a joke round here.' Leo turns in alarm, so I whisper hammily into my lapel, 'We're in! Give us thirty seconds and then start the diversion.' Leo twigs and I am rewarded with' a prim giggle as the overhead strips spank themselves alight. I realise that my childish desire to say something frivolous arises from a watchful tension in Leo, a fear almost, that I find uncomfortable. It comes and goes with him, I decide. In his rooms it was there when he talked to me of my thesis, then it disappeared to be replaced by a joshing geniality. Finally the hunted look returned to his eyes when he ended the interview by inviting me here, to this place.

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I am not sure what I expected. Something. I expected something. After all, why would a man want to give a tour of his laboratory if that laboratory were nothing more than an office?

A shiny white-board without a single formula or string of upside-down Greek characters scrawled upon it. No oscilloscopes, no Van de Graaff generators, no long glass tubes pulsing with purple blooms of ionising plasma, no deep sinks stained with horrible compounds, no glasswalled containment areas with robotic arms for the transferral of small nuggets of highly radioactive materials from one canister to another, no poster of Einstein poking his tongue out, no warm computer voice to welcome us with an eccentrically programmed personality: 'Good morning, Leo. Another shitty day, huh?' Nothing, in short, that could not be found in the sales office of your local Toyota dealer. Less in fact, for your local Toyota dealer would at least have a desk-top calculator, a computer, a pot-plant, an electronic diary, a fax-machine, an executive stress-reliever and a year-planner. No, wait up. There is at least a computer here. A little lap-top, with a mouse trailing from the side. There are too, I concede, shelves of books and magazines and, in place of the year-planner, a periodic table.

Leo marks my disappointment. 'This is not a place for what we call the wet sciences, I am afraid.'

I go up to the periodic table and examine it intelligently, to show some interest.

'That was left by my predecessor,' Leo says. Well there you go.

I look about me. The remark 'So this is where it all goes on then' while honoured by convention, would sound rather foolish, so I just nod vigorously as if I approve the smell and tone of the place.

'If I need equipment there are other rooms where I may book time on the big machines.'

'Ah. Right. Really then, you're more a theoretical physicist?'

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'Is there any other kind?' But said sweetly, without impatience.

He moves to his lap-top and opens it up. I see now that this is like no lap-top I've ever known and I can tell from the trembling of his long ringers that this is an important moment for him. The top section of the device is conventional enough, a rectangular screen. It is the keyboard which takes the eye. There runs a row of square buttons along the top, where function keys might be, but they have no attributes printed on them. Numbers, letters and ciphers are hand-scrawled in yellow Chinagraph under each key. The main body of the casing where the qwerty keys and trackball or pad should be is taken up with small black squares of glass which reflect back the strip-lighting on the ceiling above. Underneath the section of bench where this homemade box stands - I suppose it right to use the word bench, since this is, despite all appearances, a laboratory

- there is a cupboard. Leo opens the doors to this cupboard and at last I see some proper machinery. Two stately steel cabinets equipped with heavy power switches and, writhing all around, as bewildering a tagliatelli of cabling as one could hope for. I note for the first time that there are two wide multicoloured connecting ribbons, like old Centronix parallel printing cable, spewing from the back of the lap-top and down into this cupboard.

Leo throws the power switch on each cabinet. There is a deep satisfying hum as cooling fans begin to play. The black panes of glass on the keyboard now reveal themselves to be LED displays, for a line of green eights lights up and flashes, as on a video recorder whose clock has not been set. Leo bends back his fingers to crack his knuckles as his hands hover above the keyboard. He darts a swift glance towards me and presses a sequence of his function keys, a little guiltily, like a shopper who cannot resist playing Chopsticks on a department store synthesiser. One by one, in a sweeping line, the flashing

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eights compose themselves into stable digits and the screen flowers into life.

What was I hoping to see? An animated model of the birth of the Universe perhaps. Revolving DNA. Fractal geometry. Secret UN files on the spread of a new and horrible disease. Scrolling numbers. Satellite spy pictures. Ten Hatcher naked. President Clinton's personal e-mail files. The design for a new weapon of destruction. Tight close-up of a Cardassian warlord announcing the invasion of Earth.

What did I see? I saw the screen filled with clouds. Not meteorological clouds, but coloured clouds, as of a

gas. Yet not gaseous clouds. If I looked further into them they were perhaps more like air currents as seen from a thermal camera. Inside these rolling currents shifted areas of purer colour, edged with iridescent coronas which swirled and fizzed, cycling through the spectrum as they moved. Hypnotic. Beautiful too, quite radiantly beautiful. There were, however, screen-savers on most PCs which were no less easy on the eye.

'What do you think, Michael?' Leo is staring at the screen. The coloured masses are reflected on the lenses of his spectacles. On his face I see the haunted, hungry look that puzzled me before. Obsession. Not by Calvin Klein, but Obsession by Thomas Mann or Vladimir Nabokov. The pained need, anger and despair of a guilty old pervert burning young beauty with a stare. Or so I think at the time. By now I should be used to getting things wrong.

'It's beautiful,' I breathe, as if afraid that my voice might burst the soft loveliness of colours. Yes, burst, for that is what they are like, these shapes, I now realise. They are like filmy bubbles of soap. The softly rotating membranes of oiled rainbow soothe the eye and float down deep into the soul.

'Beautiful?' Leo's eyes never leave the screen. His right hand is on the mouse and the shapes move. As the scene shifts, the screen reminds me of the cinemas of my childhood. I would sit alone in the dark with twenty

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minutes to wait before the Benson and Hedges and Bacardi commercials. To beguile the time the Odeon management offered music and a light-show of psychedelic pinks and greens and oranges writhing in liquid on the screen. I would watch with a sagging mouth into

which Raisin Poppets would be dumbly pushed one by one as the colours changed and the bubbles of air suspended in the liquid worked their way across the screen like jerking amoebas.

'Yes, beautiful,' I repeat. 'Don't you think so?' 'What do you imagine you are looking at?'

'I'm not sure.' My voice does not rise above its reverent whisper. 'Gas of some kind?'

Now Leo looks at me for the first time. 'Gas?' He smiles a joyless smile. 'Gas, he says!' Shaking his head, he turns back to the screen.

'What then?'

'And yet it might be gas,' he says, more to himself than to me. 'What a horrible joke. Yes, it might be gas.' I notice that he is gnawing his lower lip with the insistent speed of a rodent. He has torn the skin and blood is seeping but he does not seem to notice. 'I tell you what you are looking at, Michael. You won't believe me, but I tell you all the same.'

'Yes?'

He jabs a finger at the screen and says, 'Behold! Anus mundi! Das Arschloch der Welt!' My puzzlement and shock amuse him and he nods his head vigorously. 'You are looking,' he says, pointing his chin to the screen, 'at Auschwitz.'

I look from Leo to the screen and back again. 'I'm sorry?' 'Auschwitz. You must have heard of it. A place in Poland. Very famous. The asshole of the world.'

'But what do you mean exactly? A photograph? Infra-red, thermal imaging, something like that?'

'Not thermal imaging. Temporal imaging one might call it. Yes, that would do.'

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'I'm still not with you.'

'You are looking,' says Leo pointing at the screen, 'at Auschwitz Concentration Camp on the 9th of October, 1942.'

I frown in puzzlement. So slow. I am so slow. 'How do you mean?'

'I mean how I mean. This is Auschwitz on October 9th. Three o'clock in the afternoon. You are looking at that day.'

I stare again at the lovely billowing shapes in their sweet rippling colours.

'You mean ... a film?

'Still you ask what I mean and still I mean what I mean and still you do not grasp what I mean. I mean that you are looking at both a place and a time.'

I stare at him.

'If this laboratory had a window,' says Leo, 'and you looked out of it, you would see Cambridge on the 5th of June, 1996, yes?'

I nod.

'When you look into this screen, it is the same, a window. All these shapes, these motions, they are the movements of men and women in Auschwitz, Poland, October 9th, 1942. You could call them energy signatures. Particular traces.'

'You mean ... that is, are you saying that this machine is looking back in time?'

'One of these shapes,' Leo continues as if I have not spoken, his eyes darting back and forth across the screen, 'one of these colours,' his hand nudges the mouse, 'one of these. Any one of them, it could be any one of them.'

'What could be any one of them?'

He turns to me for a second. 'Somewhere in here is my father.'

I watch as he works the mouse savagely in his search. It seems to behave like a TV , camera handle, allowing him to pan, tilt and zoom around his world of coloured forms.

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He rolls the mouse hard to the left: the whole scene revolves clockwise.

'My father arrived at Auschwitz on October 8th. That much I know. There! Do you think this is him?' Leo stabs a ringer at a low shape whose feathery outer sheath oscillates with a delicate mauve. 'Perhaps that is him. Maybe it is a dog, or a horse. Or just a tree. A corpse. Most likely a corpse.' •

¦ There are tears in Leo's angry eyes, tears which run down his face to mingle with the blood that still oozes from his chewed lip. 'I will never know,' he says, bending below the desk to thump the power switches. 'Never ever will I know.'

With a singing prickle of static the screen is emptied. The LED digits vanish. The quiet hum of the fan is stilled with a whoomp. I stare at the blank screen, silent.

'There now, Michael Young,' Leo absorbs a tear elegantly with the sharp edge of the shirt cuff that protrudes from his lab coat sleeve. 'You have seen Auschwitz. Congratulations.'

'Are you serious?'

'Quite serious.' Leo's anger and intensity have disappeared and he is a calm Uncle Smurf once more.

He closes up the machine and strokes the mouse with gentle affection.

'We really were looking back in time?'

'Every time you look into the night sky you are looking back in time. It's no big deal.'

'But you were focusing on a single day.'

'It is a different kind of telescope for sure. Unfortunately it is also quite useless. Just a light show, is all. An artificial quantum singularity of no more use than an electric pencil-sharpener. Less.'

'You can't translate all those coloured swirls into recognisable forms?'

'I cannot.' 'But one day?'

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