“Who did?”
“Robert Stoney. Mathematician. Used to be up at Manchester, but he’s a Fellow of Kings, and now he’s back in Cambridge. Did some kind of secret war work. Same thing as Malcolm Muggeridge, apparently.
No one’s allowed to say what.”
Jack looked up, amused. He’d heard rumors about Muggeridge, but they all revolved around the business of analyzing intercepted German radio messages. What conceivable use would a mathematician have been, for that? Sharpening pencils for the intelligence analysts, presumably.
“What about him, Willie?” Jack asked patiently.
Willie continued reluctantly, as if he was confessing to something mildly immoral. “I paid him a visit yesterday. Place called the Cavendish. Old army friend of mine has a brother who works there. Got the whole tour.”
“I know the Cavendish. What’s there to see?”
“He’s doing things, Jack.Impossible things.”
“Impossible?”
“Looking inside people. Putting it on a screen, like a television.”
Jack sighed. “Taking X rays?”
Willie snapped back angrily, “I’m not a fool; I know what an X ray looks like. This is different. You can see the blood flow. You can watch your heartbeating. You can follow a sensation through the nerves from…fingertip to brain. He says, soon he’ll be able to watch a thought in motion.”
“Nonsense.” Jack scowled. “So he’s invented some gadget, some fancy kind of X-ray machine. What are you so agitated about?”
Willie shook his head gravely. “There’s more. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. He’s only been back in Cambridge a year, and already the place is overflowing with…wonders.” He used the word begrudgingly, as if he had no choice, but was afraid of conveying more approval than he intended.
Jack was beginning to feel a distinct sense of unease.
“What exactly is it you want me to do?” he asked.
Willie replied plainly, “Go and see for yourself. Go and see what he’s up to.”
The Cavendish Laboratory was a mid-Victorian building, designed to resemble something considerably older and grander. It housed the entire Department of Physics, complete with lecture theaters; the place was swarming with noisy undergraduates. Jack had had no trouble arranging a tour: he’d simply telephoned Stoney and expressed his curiosity, and no more substantial reason had been required.
Stoney had been allocated three adjoining rooms at the back of the building, and the “spin resonance imager” occupied most of the first. Jack obligingly placed his arm between the coils, then almost jerked it out in fright when the strange, transected view of his muscles and veins appeared on the picture tube. He wondered if it could be some kind of hoax, but he clenched his fist slowly and watched the image do the same, then made several unpredictable movements that it mimicked equally well.
“I can show you individual blood cells, if you like,” Stoney offered cheerfully.
Jack shook his head; his current, unmagnified flaying was quite enough to take in.
Stoney hesitated, then added awkwardly, “You might want to talk to your doctor at some point. It’s just that, your bone density’s rather-” He pointed to a chart on the screen beside the image. “Well, it’s quite a bit below the normal range.”
Jack withdrew his arm. He’d already been diagnosed with osteoporosis, and he’d welcomed the news: it meant that he’d taken a small part of Joyce’s illness-the weakness in her bones-into his own body.
God was allowing him to suffer a little in her stead.
If Joyce were to step between these coils, what might that reveal?But there’d be nothing to add to her diagnosis. Besides, if he kept up his prayers, and kept up both their spirits, in time her remission would blossom from an uncertain reprieve into a fully fledged cure.
He said, “How does this work?”
“In a strong magnetic field, some of the atomic nuclei and electrons in your body are free to align themselves in various ways with the field.” Stoney must have seen Jack’s eyes beginning to glaze over; he quickly changed tack. “Think of it as being like setting a whole lot of spinning tops whirling, as vigorously as possible, then listening carefully as they slow down and tip over. For the atoms in your body, that’s enough to give some clues as to what kind of molecule, and what kind of tissue, they’re in. The machine listens to atoms in different places by changing the way it combines all the signals from billions of tiny antennae. It’s like a whispering gallery where we can play with the time that signals take to travel from different places, moving the focus back and forth through any part of your body, thousands of times a second.”
Jack pondered this explanation. Though it sounded complicated, in principle it wasn’t that much stranger than X rays.
“The physics itself is old hat,” Stoney continued, “but for imaging, you need a very strong magnetic field, and you need to make sense of all the data you’ve gathered. Nevill Mott made the superconducting alloys for the magnets. And I managed to persuade Rosalind Franklin from Birkbeck to collaborate with us, to help perfect the fabrication process for the computing circuits. We cross-link lots of little Y-shaped DNA fragments, then selectively coat them with metal; Rosalind worked out a way to use X-ray crystallography for quality control. We paid her back with a purpose-built computer that will let her solve hydrated protein structures in real time, once she gets her hands on a bright enough X-ray source.” He held up a small, unprepossessing object, rimmed with protruding gold wires. “Each logic gate is roughly a hundred Angstroms cubed, and we grow them in three-dimensional arrays. That’s a million, million, million switches in the palm of my hand.”
Jack didn’t know how to respond to this claim. Even when he couldn’t quite follow the man there was something mesmerizing about his ramblings, like a cross between William Blake and nursery talk.
“If computers don’t excite you, we’re doing all kinds of other things with DNA.” Stoney ushered him into the next room, which was full of glassware, and seedlings in pots beneath strip lights. Two assistants seated at a bench were toiling over microscopes; another was dispensing fluids into test tubes with a device that looked like an overgrown eye-dropper.
“There are a dozen new species of rice, corn, and wheat here. They all have at least double the protein and mineral content of existing crops, and each one uses a different biochemical repertoire to protect itself against insects and fungi. Farmers have to get away from monocultures; it leaves them too vulnerable to disease, and too dependent on chemical pesticides.”
Jack said, “You’ve bred these? All these new varieties, in a matter of months?”
“No, no! Instead of hunting down the heritable traits we needed in the wild, and struggling for years to produce cross-breeds bearing all of them, we designed every trait from scratch. Then we manufactured DNA that would make the tools the plants need, and inserted it into their germ cells.”
Jack demanded angrily, “Who are you to say what a plant needs?”
Stoney shook his head innocently. “I took my advice from agricultural scientists, who took their advice from farmers. They know what pests and blights they’re up against. Food crops are as artificial as Pekinese. Nature didn’t hand them to us on a plate, and if they’re not working as well as we need them to, nature isn’t going to fix them for us.”
Jack glowered at him, but said nothing. He was beginning to understand why Willie had sent him here.
The man came across as an enthusiastic tinkerer, but there was a breathtaking arrogance lurking behind the boyish exterior.
Stoney explained a collaboration he’d brokered between scientists in Cairo, Bogota, London, and Calcutta, to develop vaccines for polio, smallpox, malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, tuberculosis, influenza, and leprosy. Some were the first of their kind; others were intended as replacements for existing vaccines. “It’s important that we create antigens without culturing the pathogens in animal cells that might themselves harbor viruses. The teams are all looking at variants on a simple, cheap technique that involves putting antigen genes into harmless bacteria that will double as delivery vehicles and adjuvants, then freeze-drying them into spores that can survive tropical heat without refrigeration.”
Jack was slightly mollified; this all sounded highly admirable. What business Stoney had instructing doctors on vaccines was another question. Presumably his jargon made sense to them, but when exactly had this mathematician acquired the training to make even the most modest suggestions on the topic? “You’re having a remarkably productive year,” he observed.
