free energy that his machine would deliver, for it would close off an important tax resource. Or the armed forces would seize on the idea, declare it top secret, then develop it for their own use. Or conventional energy providers would send round thugs to beat the inventor to a pulp in order to maintain business supremacy. Or someone would steal the idea for himself and make his fortune. There were notorious instances of all these, the writer might add. The drawings could therefore only be seen at a certain address by an unaccompanied person from the Centre, and only with the involvement of intermediaries.
The table in ‘Hut Two’ consisted of five builder’s planks set on trestles, supporting sixteen hundred letters and printed emails, sorted by date. To save the Minister’s face, all would need an answer. Braby, a stooping, large-jawed fellow, was furious at the waste of time. Furious, but compliant. Beard was for forwarding them all to the Minister’s department in London, along with a few model replies. But Braby thought he was in line for a knighthood and Mrs Braby was keen, and upsetting a minister known to be close to Number Ten could blow the gong away. So the post-docs were set to work, and the Centre’s first project – designing a wind generator for city roofs – was delayed by months.
All the more time for Beard, not yet a refugee from the near-silent endgame of his fifth marriage, to study the ‘geniuses’, so named by the post-docs. He was drawn by the whiff of obsession, paranoia, insomnia and, above all, pathos that rose from the piles. Was he finding, he wondered, a version of himself in certain of these letters, of a parallel Michael Beard who, through drink, sex, drugs or plain misfortune, might have missed out on the disciplines of a formal education in physics and maths? Missed out, and still craved to think, tinker, contribute. Some of these men were truly clever but were required by their extravagant ambitions to reinvent the wheel, and then, one hundred and twenty years after Nikola Tesla, the induction motor, and then read inexpertly and far too hopefully into quantum field theory to find their esoteric fuel right under their noses, in the voids of the empty air of their sheds or spare bedrooms – zero-point energy.
Quantum mechanics. What a repository, a dump, of human aspiration it was, the borderland where mathematical rigour defeated common sense, and reason and fantasy irrationally merged. Here, the mystically inclined could find whatever they required, and claim science as their proof. And for these ingenious men in their spare time, what ghostly and beautiful music it must be – spectral asymmetry, resonances, entanglement, quantum harmonic oscillators – beguiling ancient airs, the harmony of the spheres that might transmute a lead wall into gold, and bring into being the engine that ran on virtually nothing, on virtual particles, that emitted no harm and would power the human enterprise as well as save it. Beard was stirred by the yearnings of these lonely men. And why should he think they were lonely? It was not, or not only, condescension that made him think them so. They did not know enough, but they knew too much to have anyone to talk to. What mate waiting down the pub or in the British Legion, what hard-pressed wife with job and kids and housework, was going to follow them down these warped funnels in the space-time continuum, into the wormhole, the shortcut to a single, final answer to the global problem of energy?
Beard devised a rubric inspired by the US Patent Office which advised the geniuses that all plans for perpetual motion and ‘above unity’ machines should be accompanied by a working model. But none ever was. Mindful of his ambitions, Braby watched over the post-docs closely as they worked through the piles. Every submission had to be answered individually, seriously, politely. But on the planks there was nothing new, or nothing new that was useful. The revolutionary lone inventor was a fantasy of popular culture – and the Minister.
With numbing slowness the Centre began to take shape. Duckboards were laid over the mud – a huge advance – then the mud was smoothed and seeded, and by summer there were lawns with paths across them, and in time the place resembled every other boring institute in the world. The labs were refitted, and at last the temporary cabins were hauled away. The adjacent field was drained, and foundations were dug, and building began. More staff were taken on – janitors, office cleaners, administrators, repair men, even scientists, and a human-resources team to find such people. When a critical mass was reached, a canteen was opened. And housed in a smart brick lodge next to red-and-white striped barrier gates were a dozen security guards in dark blue uniforms, who were cheery with one another, stern with almost everyone else and who seemed to believe that the place essentially belonged to them, and all the rest were interlopers.
In all this time, not one of the six post-docs moved on to a better-paid job at Caltech or MIT. In a field crammed with prodigies of all sorts, their CVs were exceptional. For a long while Beard, who had always had face-recognition problems, especially with men, could not, or chose not to, tell them apart. They ranged in age from twenty-six to twenty-eight and all stood above six feet. Two had ponytails, four had identical rimless glasses, two were called Mike, two had Scots accents, three wore coloured string around their wrists, all wore faded jeans and trainers and tracksuit tops. Far better to treat them all the same, somewhat distantly, or as if they were one person. Best not to insult one Mike by resuming a conversation that might have been with the other, or to assume that the fellow with the ponytail and glasses, Scots accent and no wrist string was unique, or was not called Mike. Even Jock Braby referred to all six as ‘the ponytails’.
And none of these young men appeared as much in awe of Michael Beard, Nobel laureate, as he thought they should. Clearly, they knew of his work, but in meetings they referred to it in passing, parenthetically, in a dismissive mumble, as though it had long been superseded, when in fact the opposite was true, the Beard-Einstein Conflation was in all the textbooks, unassailable, experimentally robust. As undergraduates the ponytails would surely have witnessed a demonstration of the ‘Feynman Plaid’, illustrating the topographical essence of Beard’s work. But at informal gatherings in the canteen these giant children became frontiersmen of theoretical physics and spoke round the Conflation, treated it as one might a dusty formulation by Sir Humphry Davy, and made elliptical references to BLG or some overwrought arcana in M-theory or Nambu Lie 3 -algebra as if it were not a change of subject. And that was the problem. Much of the time he did not know what they were saying. The ponytails spoke at speed, on a constant, rising interrogative note, which caused an obscure muscle to tighten in the back of Beard’s throat as he listened. They failed to enunciate their words, going only so far with a thought, until one of the others muttered, ‘Right!’, after which they would jump to the next unit of utterance – one could hardly call it a sentence.
But it was worse than that. Some of the physics which they took for granted was unfamiliar to him. When he looked it up at home, he was irritated by the length and complexity of the calculations. He liked to think he was an old hand and knew his way around string theory and its major variants. But these days there were simply too many add-ons and modifications. When Beard was a twelve-year-old schoolboy, his maths teacher had told the class that whenever they found an exam question coming out at eleven nineteenths or thirteen twenty- sevenths, they should know they had the wrong answer. Too messy to be true. Frowning for two hours at a stretch, so that the following morning parallel pink lines were still visible across his forehead, he read up on the latest, on Bagger, Lambert and Gustavsson – of course! BLG was not a sandwich – and their Lagrangian description of coincident M2-branes. God may or may not have played dice, but surely He was nowhere near this clever, or such a show-off. The material world simply could not be so complicated.
But the domestic world could. In Beard’s tally of sheared wedlock, none was so foolishly prolonged – by him – and none so reduced him or engendered such ridiculous daydreams and weight-gain and unwitnessed folly as this, his fifth and last. During those long months there was never a time when he thought he was fully himself, and besides, he soon forgot that self and settled into a state of mild and extended psychosis. He was hearing voices after all, and seeing elements in the situation – Patrice’s sudden, lambent beauty, for example – which he decided later did not exist. The somatic consequences had a textbook quality. A sequence of minor ailments mocked the immune system that was supposed to protect him. Pathogens swam in hordes across the moat of his defences, they swarmed over the castle walls armed with cold sores, mouth ulcers, fatigue, joint pain, watery bowels, nose acne, blepharitis – a new one this, a disfiguring inflammation of the eyelids that erupted into white-peaked Mount Fuji styes that pressured his eyeballs, blurring his vision. Insomnia and monomania also distorted his view, and on the edge of sleep, when it came at last, he heard a newsreader’s voice reminding him of his sorry state, but not in words he could actually hear. Beyond this, he suffered the rational despair of a cuckold whose wife, despite her fading black eye, still moved about the house with a triumphal air, falsely cheerful, drifting away the moment he attempted a serious conversation. The mouth is famously over-represented in the brain, and he felt a tiny sore along a crack in the centre of his lower lip as a hideous cicatrice, the mark of his fate. How could she ever kiss him again? She would not be engaged or challenged or accused, she would not be loved, not by him.
Yes, yes, he had been a lying womaniser, he had it coming, but now that it had arrived, what
