kroth: the slant

3: circling shark

“Let's get out of here,” muttered Vic when he had pushed his way past the reporters. They weren't following us; they wanted to keep watch on the exit door. “Back to the hotel for lunch.” It was, in fact, rather too early for lunch, but I didn't point this out. We drove back in silence.
    At the hotel he disappeared into his room, which was what I expected him to do, as he had his notes to write up and a statement and an article to compose. Working to a deadline, he wouldn't have time for sociable chit-chat about what had occurred. This was the excuse I made for his preoccupied air. On another level I sensed a different explanation; I could tell he was worried and I could guess why:
    Vic had been forced, at last, to come off the fence.
    At lunch, which we ate in the hotel restaurant (just we two; Reen, it seemed, was out for the day) he appeared reluctant to talk about the result of the Experiment. I made one or two comments about it and he shied away from the topic as though it were Top Secret even though we both knew it was going to be in the evening news and all over tomorrow's papers. He talked round it, alluding to moments of historic decision such as Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon or Hitler's declaration of war on the USA.
    I quoted grandly, “'There is a tide in the affairs of men',” and then dug into my cannelloni.
    “Ah, so Crickham Secondary does Julius Caesar. That's something anyway.” He brooded for a moment and then added, “As for me, I'd rather quote from the movies.”
    “Go on, then.”
    “'If you don't grab life, life'll grab you.'”
    “The point being....?”
    “I intend to be the grabber.”
    After the meal we repaired to the lounge for coffee, but he had only got through half a cup when a waiter came to say there was a call for him.
    “Thanks. I'll take it up in my room.” Vic left the lounge with an energetic stride. It was about ten minutes before he reappeared with a kind of bloodless expression I had never seen on his face before – an astonished dismay, as though he had come off worst in an argument which he had not expected to lose. “Duncan,” he said, “I want your advice about something. Not here, though. Let's go back up.”
    “Right,” I said slowly, and “right, right,” I repeated under my breath, feeling stupid yet proud as I followed him to his room, where we sat at the table on which he had strewn his notes. For a couple of moments he directed his scowl at those notes.
    “I am not permitted to tell you who has called. I promised to keep it confidential. However I can give you the gist of what he said. He argued, quite persuasively, that to release a favourable report on Matt Boone's PK claims would do great damage to science.”
    Vic paused and I said, “Oh. So he wasn't convinced, this caller of yours.”
    “On the contrary, he was most definitely convinced! Not for one moment did he attempt to deny that Boone had been vindicated. And he admitted that science ought to be sufficiently robust to take a knock now and then. The point he made – now listen carefully – was that, in the present state of education, the public couldn't be trusted with the truth; they'd go berserk and snatch back the funding from countless worthwhile projects just because all science seems to be discredited if Boone is right. Never mind that this public attitude will be short-sighted, question-begging, philosophically inadequate and so on; it's nevertheless what will actually happen if the news gets out. The caller then requested that I do something to save the situation. He said that if I threw my influence on the side of minimising the Imperial College experiment results, my action might save lives. He said that he knew he was asking me to do something that was dishonest by normal standards, but he argued that if the truth cannot be received properly, if the truth is bound to be taken the wrong way, then it's the truth that is effectively dishonest and a lie. Now, I hate that kind of twisted argument yet I see his point. I thought I'd get your opinion. What do you think I should do?”
    “Go for the truth, the real truth,” I said without hesitation, utterly certain I was on firm ground. “Otherwise you're letting Matt down, you're letting the College down, you're letting yourself down and ultimately you're letting science itself down.” I was in fine preaching mode just then.
    Vic's face contorted into a guilty grin that unscrewed again after a few seconds and I saw he looked much relieved. “I do like your black and white approach. Ah, the vigour of youthful thought! You've given me just the injection I needed. Fiat iustitia et ruant coeli.”
    “Uncle, please, I've told you often enough, I didn't do Latin.”
    “Never mind,” he replied happily; “it has a grand sound, don't you think?”
    I left him to get on with his press releases and his articles. Though I felt good that he had confided his doubts to me, I felt no sense of responsibility about the advice I had given him, for I could not believe that he had really needed it; instead I interpreted his request as a favour and a compliment to me. It was his way of educating me in the ways of the world, giving me a taste of involvement in the big stuff. That I actually might have pushed him towards one conclusion or the other was an idea which I dismissed out of hand.
    That evening, after he had emailed his articles, Vic went off back to Imperial College to appear live in a TV newsclip which I watched from my room. The programme gave him about thirty seconds to convey the bare bones of what had happened in the Experiment. It didn't amount to much. The voice-over commentary was in a breezy tone that almost made a joke of it all. He had warned me not to expect more than this; it was too soon for a more serious response. Tomorrow morning's papers would be where the coverage got properly underway.
    While he was out I went into his room (he had left me his key and told me I could have the use of his laptop) and I went on the Net to look up fiat iustitia et ruant coeli.
    As the translation floated on the screen before my eyes, my thoughts became cushioned in a great quietness; not a muscle moved in my body.
“Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”

                                                  *

Doubts then began to swirl in my head like sharks circling a diver's cage. I needed to reinforce the bars of that “cage”, quick; I had to firm up my anti-stress stance. Anti-stress, anti-stress, that’s forever the essential thing for me. I switched off the laptop, went out of Vic's room and locked the door; then I went down and left his key at reception, then went back up to my room and locked the door from the inside, and lay down.
    Let justice be done though the heavens fall.
    Even now, as I write this, my mind boggles at the idea that, if I had acted differently, I might have prevented what afterwards happened. What consoles me, a year later, is that I eventually turned out to be in a position to do something about it after it had happened.... but at the beginning I could not face the responsibility, or rather, the mere possibility of being responsible for what might ensue from Vic's decision – encouraged by me – to go ahead with the historic announcement of the PK breakthrough.
    The reader may wonder at this point why I did not seek the comfort of human contact. Above all, why did I not try to phone Elaine? She had phoned me in her hour of need; I would have been justified in doing the same. But I did not have her address, and her number was ex-directory, and I had not asked her for it when I had the chance, because I was an over-cautious cowardly fool. Or to put it a bit more nicely, I had lacked the necessary presence of mind.
    So I switched on the TV. It's not just that I needed to relax – I could have done that with a book. I needed to be bored. And that is why, even if I had had her number, it would not have been any use to phone Elaine. You can't banish a small, distant, closer-creeping threat merely by placing good things in front of it to block the view. Horror can grin over the shoulder of Good - whereas boredom, which kills good and evil alike, is incompatible with fear.
    I flicked through the TV channels, inventing names for each one: the bunk channel, the twaddle channel, the yuk channel.... until I happened upon something that seemed not too repulsive. I found myself watching a documentary about Monticello – Thomas Jefferson's house. A topic that linked the ordinary and the extraordinary: the home life of the Great. Good, I thought, this is how to get away from it all and keep calm. The only trouble was, it wasn't really boring enough. Not boring at all, in fact. Being ignorant of American history, I felt the kind of mental pleasure that is the equivalent of taking a shower – when you're all hot and sticky with a mess of questions, take a shower of new facts from a different world. So this was all right, I thought: although it wasn't boredom, it was irrelevance, which did the job just as well. A more pleasant defence against those circling sharks.
    I ought to have known better.
    The presenter toured Monticello exhibiting the bizarre fixtures which the third President had installed in it, and which made me think of the eccentric inventions of the White Knight in Alice Through the Looking Glass. I especially liked one feature of Jefferson's design: the bed that was placed between two rooms, so that you could get out of bed either into one room or (from the other side) into the other. Most of all I liked the fact that Jefferson and Monticello and the early-1800s USA seemed as far as one could get from anything to do with me and my problems.
    What I failed to take into account was the way the unconscious can create links. That night I sank into a dream which must have been influenced by the documentary.
    I was in a bed like the one at Monticello. I was dithering as to which side to get out. Into which room should I emerge?
    Should I do what I wanted to do and get out into the familiar room on the right, my own? Or should I obey a blob of growing darkness which was reaching out with the intention of pulling me into the other room on my left? The amoeboid blob, billowing like a weightless liquid, was also in some sense a hovering curtain on which was embroidered a graph, a steepening curve, which told me that the blob was gathering force to compel me to choose the other room, and as I felt the pull begin I clutched at the bedclothes, sat up and shouted at tomorrow to go away. It wasn't courage that I showed, as I raged at the nightmare; it was despair, the cornered rat in me lashing out with all it had till I sank back, exhausted with my efforts.
    Had I impressed my views on the enemy? Had I altered what it was going to do with me? Sadly, no. My protest merely made the dark grin wider. The nightmare, the unfaceable one, was opening its jaw to receive me for keeps. With my last ounce of will I found the strength to roll over, out of bed and into the room I knew, rejecting the unknown.