‘Too optimistic. You’d need to halve that again.’
‘My point stands, Professor Beard. Solar arrays on a tiny fraction of the world’s deserts would give us all the power we need.’
The Norfolk lad’s bucolic tone, so at odds with what he was saying, was beginning to aggravate Beard’s raw condition. He said sullenly, ‘If you could distribute it.’
‘Yes. New DC lines! That’s just money and effort. Worth it for the planet! For our future, Professor Beard!’
Beard snapped the pages of his speech to indicate that the conversation was at a close. The essence of a crank was, firstly, to believe that all the world’s problems could be reduced to one, and be solved. And secondly, to go on about it non-stop.
But Tom Aldous was not done with him yet. As they arrived at the Centre and the gates were raised, he said, as though there had been no break in the discussion, ‘That’s why, I mean, no disrespect, that’s why I think we’re wasting our time with this micro wind-power stuff. The technology’s already good enough. The government just needs to make it attractive to people – it’s stroke-of-the-pen stuff, the market will do the rest. There’s so much money to be made. But solar – cutting-edge artificial photosynthesis – there’s great basic research to do on the nanotechnology. Professor, it could be us!’
Aldous was holding open the door and Beard was climbing wearily out. He said, ‘Thank you for your thoughts. But really, you should learn to keep your eyes on the road.’ And he turned away to shake Braby’s hand.
On his weekly round, therefore, he hoped to avoid running into Aldous alone, for the young man was always trying to convince him of photovoltaics, or his quantum explanation of photovoltaics, or to oppress him generally with friendliness and enthusiasm, and seemed oblivious to Beard’s surliness whenever he repeated the case for dropping WUDU. Of course it ought to be abandoned, when it was devouring nearly all the budget and growing in complication as it diminished in interest. But it had been Beard’s idea, and reversing it would be a personal disaster. So he was coming to dislike this young man, his big-boned goofy face and flaring nostrils, his ponytail, his wrist bracelet of grubby red and green string intertwined, his holier-than-thou diet of salad and yoghurt in the canteen, his habit of bringing his tray over unasked and sitting as close as possible to the Chief, who could only be depressed to learn that Aldous had boxed for Norfolk in the county championships, had rowed for his college at Cambridge, had come seventh in a San Francisco marathon. There were novels Aldous wanted him to read – novels! – and developments in contemporary music he thought Beard should be aware of, and movies that were of particular relevance, documentaries about climate change which Aldous had seen at least twice but would happily see again if there was a chance of making the Chief sit through them too. Aldous had a mind that was designed, through the medium of a Norfolk accent, to offer tireless advice, make recommendations, urge changes, or express enthusiasm for some journey or holiday or book or vitamin, which itself was a form of exhortation. Nothing eroded Beard’s goodwill more than to hear again that he must spend a month in the Vale of Swat.
In the building where once brick dust and fibreglass insulation had been tested for non- beneficial effects, he wandered between labs and listened to progress reports from engineers, designers and mysteriously termed energy consultants, who were responsible for a long document called ‘Discovering Micro Wind 4.2’, of which he could not bring himself to read even the first paragraph. During that summer so many were taken on by the Department of Human Resources, which had just been taken on itself, that each week he was obliged to explain who he was to half a dozen strangers. There were very few who were not busy with WUDU, and as he went about, Beard became more downhearted. For all the toil, nothing was ready for testing at Farnborough, no one had really addressed the turbulence problem, and no one was thinking much about what might happen when the wind did not blow because no one had the first idea about storing electricity cheaply and efficiently. That would have been a radical project, designing a powerful new battery for domestic supply, but it was too late to suggest it now, with everyone committed to WUDU, and besides, battery research was what Tom Aldous kept suggesting. Far better to build a boutique nuclear reactor on the Dorset Jurassic Coast than to wreck a million roofs with the shearing and vibration, the backward force and twist and torque of some worthless gadget for which the wind was rarely strong enough to motivate a useful current.
How could it be, Beard wondered with a touch of self-pity as he left one office and went glumly towards the next, that a chance remark of his had sent everyone rushing on this pointless quest? The answer was simple. In response to his proposal, there had been memoranda, detailed proposals one hundred and ninety-seven pages long, budget outlines and spreadsheets, and he had initialled his approval on each without reading them. And why was that? Because Patrice was starting her affair with Tarpin and he was not able to think of anything else.
He was going back along the corridor, passing Braby’s office on his way to talk to a materials specialist, and there was Braby himself, waiting for him just inside his door, and waving him in excitedly. Behind him, taping a drawing to a whiteboard, was one of the two ponytails called Mike.
‘I think we’ve got something,’ Braby said as he closed the door behind Beard. ‘Mike’s just brought it over.’
‘Don’t get the wrong idea, Professor Beard,’ Mike said. ‘I didn’t draw this. I found it.’
Braby took hold of Beard’s sleeve and tugged him to the board.
‘Just look at it. I need your opinion.’
On a large sheet there was one formally executed drawing surrounded by half a dozen sketches – doodles with a solid but wavering line of the kind one might see in Leonardo’s notebooks. Watched intently by the other two, Beard was staring at the centrepiece, a thick column containing a mess of lines and cutaways that resolved at last into a quadruple helix making one complete turn, and at the base, in less detail, a boxy representation of a generator. One of the doodles showed a roofline, with a TV aerial and the helix set on a short vertical pole strapped to the side of a chimney – not a good mounting at all. For two minutes he stared in silence.
‘Well?’ Braby said.
‘Well,’ Beard muttered. ‘It’s something.’
Braby laughed. ‘I thought it was. I don’t know how it works, but I just knew it was.’
‘It’s a variant on the Darrieus machine, the old egg beater.’ In the long-ago days when he was happily, or less obsessively, married, Beard had spent an afternoon reading up on the history of wind turbines. At that stage he had thought the physics was relatively simple. ‘But what’s different here is the blades are canted into a helix with a twist of sixty degrees. And there are four of them to spread the torque and perhaps help it self-start. Probably do well out of an upward-tilting airflow. Might be good on a roof, you never know. So, who came up with this?’
But he already knew the answer and his weariness redoubled. To listen to the Swan of Swaffham celebrate a breakthrough, the dawn of a new era in turbine design, would be more than he could bear today. It would have to be next week, for what he wanted at that moment was to sit somewhere quiet and think about Patrice, excite himself to no purpose. That was how bad it was.
Mike scratched at the base of his ponytail, which showed traces, like blanket stitching, of mutinous grey. ‘It was on Tom’s desk. We guessed he must have left it out for us to see. Then we got excited, couldn’t find him anywhere. We made a copy for the engineers and they already like it.’
Jock Braby did an agitated turn about his office, returned to his desk and snatched his jacket off the back of a chair. The snob in Beard made him want to take the civil servant aside to tell him that it was not done, not since the Bletchley era, or at least, since Beard’s own undergraduate days, to have a row of ballpoints in one’s jacket top pocket. But he only ever thought his advice, he never gave it.
In a state of muted excitement, Braby was dignified, stooping from a height towards his companions and speaking in a measured, husky tone, as though at a sword’s touch he had just straightened the knee from a royal cushion. ‘I’m going to talk to Aldous, then I’m going to take him with me to Design. We need proper drawings. They can sit down with him and get to work, and meanwhile, Mike, you and the other boys can do the maths, you know, Brecht’s Law and so on.’
‘Betz’s Law.’
‘Quite so.’ And he was gone.
When Beard was done with his rounds, he settled alone with a few chocolate biscuits on a plate and a mug of stewed coffee from an urn in the deserted common room, behind the canteen, for a long time
