Outside, I took Lena’s arm. She said, ‘Can I drive you somewhere?’
‘Yes, I’m looking for some place to sleep.’
‘How am I intended to take that?’
‘Quite genuinely. I’ve got to find a motel.’
‘There are plenty.’
She guided the car with a sure hand through the labyrinth of small roads. I was glad I hadn’t been left to make my way out at this time of night. It was warm, the car was open, there was a pleasant fragrance in the air. She said, ‘I’d like to drive by the sea.’
We parked at the top of a cliff. Below us the sea spread out in a huge luminous phosphorescent arc. I turned to Lena. She smiled at my inquiring look.
I remember very little of where we went, of slipping out of the car into the house, or of the trivia of the bedroom. But I do remember lying there afterwards listening to the roar of the sea. I remember that enough light came through a long window for me to see Lena’s face. There were tears standing on her eyelashes. When I brushed them away she smiled. A moment later she was asleep. I lay awake for a little while more, at peace, still listening to the sea, before I too fell asleep.
It was late the following morning when we woke. The house was built very close by the water. The beach was fairly steeply sloping, the sand was good. A few minutes after getting out of bed I was tumbling in the surf. After a quick dry off I padded into the kitchen for breakfast. I had decided I wasn’t going to Hawaii, not unless Lena would come too. There seemed no point in my tagging along with the scientists like a camp follower. Over coffee I asked Lena if she had any wish to go out to the islands. ‘I’d like to go, but next week I’m working. If you’re going to be there for some time I could join you later.’ This seemed to be the right compromise.
I rang John during the morning to say I’d prefer not to travel with him the following day but rather come on by myself at the end of the week. There seemed no point in my hanging around in Los Angeles once Lena started at the studios.
The next few days passed all too quickly. We drove around, we swam, and made love and made music. Neither of us had any reason to feel there was anything unique about those days. I was not a soldier going to the wars, someone who might never return. After all, we would meet again in a week or two, if not in Hawaii, in Los Angeles. Yet we parted one morning at the airport with sudden sadness.
The mood lasted with me all the way to the islands. Three hours later I saw them standing up boldly out of a blue sea. I took a taxi from the airport into Honolulu. Soon I was booked into an hotel at Waikiki, close to the sea.
From there I put a call through to John who I knew would be on the island of Hawaii itself. I didn’t reach him first shot so I had to leave a message to have him call me back. This forced me to hang around the hotel. When John at last came through, quite a while later, he said it would be best if I made the island hop the following morning. Why didn’t I hire a car and take a look around Oahu? I said this was fine by me. It was mid-afternoon by the time I had the car which meant there wasn’t a great deal of the day left for sightseeing. I asked at the hotel desk which was the most spectacular beach. The girl suggested I might like to go to the north side of the island to Sunset Beach.
It was warm and sticky as I drove over the twisting mountain road. The beach itself was tremendous, yet somehow I couldn’t really get interested. I wondered if this was the way you became old, nothing excited you any more. I drove back by the east coast. After checking my car, I had an early dinner and then went straight to bed. I couldn’t sleep. I lay wide awake for an hour, then I got up, dressed, and walked out to the sea.
As I strolled along the flat sand I was in the grip of a fit of loneliness such as I had rarely, if ever, experienced before. It came gradually upon me how much loneliness was increasing in our modern society. I realized it had been a dominating factor in almost all the people I had played to the other night.
I wandered back along the beach wondering whether these ideas, which had a deep validity, I was convinced, could somehow be expressed in sound. Anything new, for it to be worthwhile, must come out of my inner feelings. It couldn’t be developed as a mere logical plan. The grandeur of Bach’s music came out of his religious impulses, not from his technique. He worked to develop the technique because of the inner convictions, not the other way round.
To the west, away from the city, stars filled the sky. As I looked up to them my senses were suddenly acute and overwhelmingly strong. Reason suggests there could be nothing to it. Yet, knowing now what was to happen, I sometimes wonder whether the future at that moment did not touch me like a cold wind across the face.
Chapter Five: Allegro Assai
The mood was gone the following morning. The trip from Honolulu to the big island of Hawaii was, I suppose, about one hundred and fifty miles. I was met at Waimea by a car. The country hereabouts was surprisingly flat, considering the fourteen-thousand-foot high Mauna Kea was only some fifteen miles to the south. The journey to the field-station was a short one and soon I was dumping my bags into a room in the sleeping quarters. Although the buildings had a prefabricated look about them they were, nevertheless, very well appointed inside. I had barely finished unpacking when John arrived.
‘Just in time,’ he said. ‘We’re beginning to get results. It’s already clear the signal is genuinely modulated.’
‘You mean the beam really is being used for conveying information?’
‘That’s what it looks like.’
About midday a party of five army and navy officers arrived. Over lunch everybody started to talk. For a while it was all much the things I knew already, apart from some technical interpolations which didn’t interest me. John explained his ideas. Clementi quickly went over the general experimental set-up. The officers got the drift, more or less as I did. They asked questions about the interference fringes, questions I was too shy to ask. Clementi drew a series of loops, by way of answer, looking somewhat like a bunch of bananas. There was a lot of talk about near-fields and far-fields but this was beyond me.
The essential idea seemed to be one of phase. If you have something that oscillates up and down the precise position where it happens to be at a given moment is the phase. What it came down to was this: if you chose a particular moment of time, and then considered the phases over a very big area, they all had to be the same, in order to explain the observations. When he was asked how big the area had to be, John replied:
‘According to my calculations about ten times the radius of the Sun.’
‘But how can you get a phase correlation over such an enormous area?’
‘That’s what we all want to know,’ muttered Clementi.
The big man padded around and stated sententiously, ‘Control phase, and you control the universe.’
‘But that’s what we do with our radar, isn’t it?’ asked an elderly, blue-eyed naval officer.